Listening or reading about brand protection can easily be confusing.
Many claim to do brand protection.
Few offer anything similar to what we do
Nobody does it the way we do it at Blue Cromos: easily, without adding anything to the product or packaging (at least not as far as we have found)
But lets sort out what we and the others mean and do in brand protection.
Legal services to protect trademarks and copyright
Systems of protection intellectual property have been around for ages; Registered Trademarks, Copyright, Patents and similar concepts. It's a whole branch of the legal profession, defining and registering and litigating when infringements have occurred. Such protection can be national, regional or global.
Does it stop the crooks? It doesn't look that way, does it. Protection depends on where you have made the registrations (and they aren't cheap), on possibilities and appetite of enforcement by local authorities. We all know that there are countries notorious for not caring for or enforcing trademarks or patents. And, even if local authorities do care, it all hinges on being able to identify the perpetrators and to bring proof to the court.
This is nothing Blue Cromos engages in.
Canvassing for online sales of fakes and counterfeit goods
As online sales have grown over recent decades, they have become the main channel for counterfeit or other kinds of dodgy products to reach consumers, both on and without purpose by consumers. That has resulted in an explosion of companies canvassing online, to identify fake products and sites selling them as well as misuse of brands names and logos. They often provide services to get authorities to block or shut down such sites, sometimes in combination with some legal efforts.
This is mainly directed at identifying and shutting down the distribution channels. The actual production of counterfeits is rarely touched, as far as we can tell.
Blue Cromos doesn't do this either.
Authenticating actual products to tell if they are fake or genuine
THIS is what we do at Blue Cromos with our isAuthentic service. We compare products or packages in the market with the originals that left the factory.
Match? 🟢 Genuine!
NO match? 🔴 Counterfeit!
So if you want to use more specific: With isAuthentic, Blue Cromos does brand protection through product authentication.
Using isAuthentic, serious dealers and distributors can weed out counterfeit products that may have wiggled their way into their supply chain and rogue dealers and producers can be brought to justice using the legal services mentioned above.
Identification of trademark infringements
But there is yet another category of fake products, as we covered in our recent blog post, not even trying to copy originals but simply slapping a fake logo on cheap rubbish, often not even attempting to imitate original designs. This is typically the kind of things you find in cheap open air markets or sold by street vendors. Maybe even what many of us mean when we talk about "fake products".
As there is no original to compare with, this is nothing for isAuthentic, but we have realised that our solution for digital product passports can be used also to identify this kind of fake products. As the platform we use for digital product passports (and other product data) both fetches data AND verifies the source of that data as well as the source of the product identifier, it will come back empty in at least one aspect for this kind of fake products and can therefore be used to sort them out from any originals.
So, this is something we CAN DO.
If you want help to be able to easily and quickly tell genuine items from counterfeits and other kinds of fake products, you're welcome to reach out to us at https://www.bluecromos.com/contact
Image by Mariia Skovpen on iStock