In the fight against counterfeits trust is taken for granted

After looking into what has been driving the counterfeit industry to become a multi-billion dollar global phenomenon I wanted to explore how an honest citizen can tell whether they are falling victim to counterfeiters.

We know from the Intellectual Property Office UK research IPO Counterfeit goods research - February 2020 (publishing.service.gov.uk) that 29% of people knowingly buy counterfeit products but it is much harder to get data on how many people have bought something in good faith and then found out it is counterfeit; given the volumes of counterfeit product and the proliferation of online shopping, it is fair to assume most of us have unwittingly bought a counterfeit or sub-standard product.

For years we have been familiar with holograms and assorted other labels as demonstrations of genuine products, and these still have their place, but few manufacturers use even these basic anti-counterfeit measures.?Amazon Transparency is a physical/digital solution that has been designed to give buyers assurance and, according to their own stats, 23,000+ brands are now registered but that appears to be a very small % of the 2.3m active sellers on the platform (57 Amazon Statistics to Know in 2022 - LandingCube)

So the poor consumer, whether buying online or in-store has to decide “do I trust this retailer”?

In making that decision you are implicitly deciding, “do I trust the brand they are selling” and “do I trust their supply chain to have kept the product secure from manufacturer to the point of sale”

For a lot of retail transactions today we turn to reviews to see if we can trust the online merchant or even a store we haven’t been to before.?But, as has been widely reported we can’t even trust the reviews that are supposedly from our peers as TIME reported in Fake Reviews: Inside the Fight to Stop Them | Time based on research from the World Economic Forum Fake online reviews cost $152 billion a year. Here's how e-commerce sites can stop them | World Economic Forum (weforum.org).

In my last posting I mentioned that counterfeit brake pads really aren’t the same as genuine in terms of performance.?There isn’t a lot of accurate data on the volume of auto parts that are counterfeited but estimates quoted widely suggest over €2 billion are lost every year in the EU due to counterfeit tyres and batteries alone, other reports suggest 20% of spare parts sold online are counterfeit.

The industry has recognised the risk.?The Automotive Anti-Counterfeiting Council, Inc. in the US has done good work in publicising the issue and makes available “how to tell” information for the member organisations and the UK Intellectual Property Office had a blitz of publicity about the issue in 2018.?Encouragingly the MAPP initiative mapp-code.com has introduced end-to-end supply chain assurance for member organisations.

So with such a lot of publicity and the MAPP initiative designed to give buyers and intermediaries the ability to check parts in their supply chains I conducted a small experiment with a randomly selected sample of UK-based online car parts retailers.?I asked their general enquiries line how I could be sure that, if I bought a well-known brake pad, I could be sure it would be a genuine part.

The answers were mixed ranging from, “I’ve been assured we only sell genuine” to, “we buy from a reputable wholesaler” to one enlightened retailer who said, “the product comes with a manufacturer's code which can be checked". The majority of the online retailers worked on the basis of "trust us".

So, trust is a critical component in the relationship between a retailer and a consumer but the supply-chain actors all the way from the brand owner to the retailer are taking our trust for granted. It is time for consumers to demand more assurance from the brands and retailers that they buy from, to demand end-to-end product traceability to give us, as consumers, the assurance that we need when making purchases.