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Description
Creating labels with measures to deter counterfeiting and authenticate products is a growing segment of the converting industry. Recent news stories like the one about potentially harmful counterfeit toothpaste bring the topic to both brand owners' and consumers' attention. Ensuring that the proper items make it to store shelves and consumer homes is important to brand owners whose businesses can suffer greatly with a decrease in consumer confidence.
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A host of measures can be taken to lessen the likelihood of intellectual property theft and counterfeiting. Label converters are a part of that process since they can add security features to product labels and packaging for their customers.
One organization dedicated to providing security solutions is the Brand Protection Alliance (BPA). Lynn Crutchfield, president of Acucote Inc., a company that provides papers and films for self-adhesive labeling applications in Graham, NC, USA, came up with the idea for the BPA and is currently its chairman. He saw the issue of brand protection as complex and that it was difficult for a single company to bring a viable solution to brand owners. "I stepped out to friends of mine in the industry who were engaged in small amounts of brand protection offerings and started banding together a group to take a variety of options to brand owners," Crutchfield explains. He put the corporation together two and a half years ago.
The BPA currently has 13 members and accepts new members as appropriate. Crutchfield says, "We tend to look across our spectrum of products and services and find missing pieces. We go out and solicit companies that can fill those voids. We try to eliminate duplication of effort wherever possible. We're not a trade association in a traditional sense. We don't need 15 ink suppliers or five pressure sensitive suppliers. We want the best in class in every category."
For now, the BPA is mainly involved in education. Crutchfield says, "We're invited to a lot of conferences and industry meetings. Our job is to increase knowledge of intellectual property theft. Eighty percent of our work is still done in the educational/awareness arena."
Types of security
There are a variety of ways to help brand owners protect their products. Three general categories of security are overt, covert and forensic. Overt refers to those measures that can be seen by consumers, such as holograms. Covert features are not easily detected by those who don't know what to look for, but they can usually be found with readily available devices (for example, taggants). Forensic measures are the most complex and include methods like DNA... |
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