Plan Ahead

Printers must be proactive and consider what steps are required to protect their customers’ brands from external threats—even if their customers don’t.

February 2009 by Jörg Dähnhardt, Heidelberg USA

multipage

Brand fraud costs the world economy billions of dollars each year, as consumers are deceived by inferior and possibly harmful knockoffs of luxury goods, medicines, and consumer products. With monetary damage like this—and even more severe consequences, such as in the case of bogus medicine—it is essential that package printers and converting companies take proactive steps to protect their customers’ brands and products from external threats. In fact, the protection process must begin long before final products leave the plant floor. Product packaging itself can have a substantial impact on brand security—this is where package printing comes into the equation. 

Since packaging is often a consumer’s first physical interaction with a retail product, adding security features to the package itself is the first line of defense in the battle for brand protection, allowing consumers, retailers, and brand representatives alike to detect fraudulent products. Different levels of security are required based on the value of the product, leading to a variety of methods to facilitate brand protection. Some techniques may be copied and very few are 100 percent foolproof. However, the intent is to make fraud more difficult for people with criminal intent—and easier to detect for the end consumer. 

What’s critical for package printers and converters is ensuring that they have a process in place to identify the best options for their customers and that they stay ahead of industry trends and technologies.

Assessing the threat and the value

Before reviewing actual technology options, printers should start by taking a close look at their customers and determining what kind of value security protection represents for them. They should ask themselves:

• What is the potential risk? 

• What is the potential reward?

A good place to start, for example, is the current estimate of damages due to fraud. It’s also important to understand what could be tampered with in the future. For example, are their customers facing the threat of a “copycat” product in fake boxes? Or, refills in original boxes? There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all security solution; rather, it is very much a consultative sales process.

Matching the security features

When approaching the security topic from the packaging side, printers and their customers need to decide on implementing either overt or covert security features. Covert techniques are invisible to the untrained eye and often require the use of a special decoder, while anyone can recognize and appreciate overt techniques immediately. A third category consists of forensic techniques. However, they are used less often as they require scientific-grade decoders and are generally only applicable to the highest security levels.

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• BRAND PROTECTION/SECURITY