What We Can Learn From Gucci’s Reluctance to Work with Alibaba & JD.com
If Gucci’s trendsetting ways are anything to go by, we may be seeing a wave of brands taking a more vocal stance against the proliferation of counterfeit goods.
The Financial Times reported on October 15, 2018, that Gucci’s President and CEO, Marco Bizzarri, was wary of partnering with behemoth ecommerce platforms Alibaba and JD.com.
“Frankly speaking, on most of the platforms there’s a lot of counterfeiting, and I don’t want to certify counterfeiting, because I belong to these platforms,” Bizzarri said at a Business of Fashion conference in Shanghai.
Bizzarri’s objection is significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, while many luxury brands have spoken out against counterfeiting in the past, they are often reluctant to point the finger directly at the businesses where counterfeiting takes place.
Gucci’s name and shame approach may be a sign that luxury brands are losing patience with ecommerce platforms where fakes are abundant. While some luxury brands try to work with such ecommerce platforms to eliminate counterfeit products, to Gucci, that is evidently not an appealing strategy.
This highlights another lesson we can learn from Gucci’s statement — ecommerce platforms need to step up their anti-counterfeiting game. The anti-counterfeiting strategies they are using now are simply not enough anymore, and it’s costing them business.
Bizzarri expressed such a sentiment strongly when he said, “There’s something wrong with counterfeiting and at this point I want to stay away…Instead of taking a risk, I wait.”
He certainly has a point — why risk your brand reputation and also deal with the potential fall out of being associated with fakes when you don’t need to?
While in the past, many brands would jump at the opportunity to partner with Alibaba and JD.com, Gucci shows that erring on the side of caution may be in a brand’s best interests.
The ball, it seems, is now in the court of luxury brands.
More brands are realizing that taking a passive approach to counterfeiting will potentially cost them billions in lost revenue.
Conversely, taking a proactive approach to counterfeiting, such as the anti-counterfeiting solution simplyBrand offers, will help fight the 1.2 trillion USD counterfeit industry head on. Considering the counterfeit industry is growing year by year, there’s clearly a need to do so.
In this article, we explored some lessons we can learn from Gucci’s reluctance to work with Alibaba and JD.com. So, the question remains — what’s your stance?
What’s your opinion on Gucci’s stance? We’d love to hear — please leave a comment below!
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About simplyBrand
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