Adopting a Customer-centric Approach to Anti-counterfeit Packaging
From Apple fighting with mock iPhone cords to Amazon struggling to manage the influx of fake products, the problem of counterfeiting has reached far beyond luxury brands and spread across numerous industries, including electronics, medical, food, and household chemicals. According to the OECD, the counterfeit trade has grown to half a trillion dollars — up from $200B in 2008. This is more than the combined GDP of two European countries, such as the Czech Republic and Ireland, or up to 5 percent of global imports.
Counterfeits pose a severe threat to the economy and are also harmful to individual well-being. Today almost any medication can be counterfeited or purposely mislabeled, causing health and safety problems for millions of consumers. Researchers predict that the fake pharmaceuticals and counterfeit drugs market will reach up to $75b in the U.S. alone by the end of this year.
Informing consumers of the potential risk and health hazards of spurious drugs and the counterfeit food is one of the best ways to protect them and stop the manufacturing of imitated goods which reduce the cost of original quality products, medications, toys, and even car parts. Here, we take a moment to explore the current situation of the anti-counterfeit packaging space, see how blockchain technology can help improve it, and enable consumers to truly understand the origin of their purchases.
The reason why today’s solutions are falling short
Manufacturers and brands invest tens of millions of dollars in ads and integrate special product-protection systems into their stores, websites, and apps to shape the buying behavior while protecting consumers from counterfeits. To do that, they hire track-and-trace technologies and anti-counterfeit packaging solutions, such as barcodes, radio-frequency identification, near-field communication systems, and holograms. In fact, various research groups predict the global anti-counterfeit packaging market to reach over $200 billion by 2021, driven by the rising threat of fake goods flooding the retail market and rapidly becoming a problem of enormous scale.
However, as a rule, today’s systems lack interoperability. They are production-centric, with each manufacturer handling things differently and choosing from a diverse range of sophisticated hardware and software infrastructure that stays unnoticed by consumers unaware of how these technologies work and unable to develop a universal way of ensuring the authenticity of goods ahead of purchase. From the consumers’ standpoint, special marking, packaging, and tagging often spoil the appearance of a packed product and have no use in improving their in-store or online shopping experience.
The customer-centric approach
We at OIN SPACE have developed a customer-centric method for verifying the authenticity of any product at every touchpoint of the shopping journey. It involves blockchain-protected QR codes, our user-friendly mobile app with a built-in reward system, and the OIN SPACE platform serving as a back-end.
The principal advantage of using this approach is that unlike old-line production-centric technologies, OIN solutions provide consumers with better knowledge of what they’re buying — the information they need to shop, compare, and ensure the authenticity of goods ahead of purchase.
The app will be free to download. By design, it will help to form a habit of using the QR code scanner more often by rewarding users with discounts and loyalty points in the form of OIN tokens, acting as a means of payment and exchange within the OIN SPACE ecosystem. In addition to verifying products’ pedigree, shoppers will gain new opportunities to save on everyday items, together with eliminating the risk of buying counterfeits.
The ecosystem behind the app and the back-end platform will lay the foundation for the consumer trust economy based on consumer-centric loyalty programs, an authentic shopping experience, and anti-counterfeit packaging solutions for brands, manufacturers, retailers, and their shoppers. Seeking to raise up to $30M to build the system, we will conduct our token sale event, commencing in mid-June, 2018. The sale of OIN tokens will give early contributors a massive discount — feel free to join our White List.
Please, use the following links to get official updates:
- OIN SPACE PRE-SALE — starting in mid-June, 2018
- OIN SPACE Documentation — Whitepaper and One-pager
- OIN SPACE Social — Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram
