The System of Anti-Counterfeiting (ACF)

In the battle against Chinese infringers of intellectual property rights, successful companies always act strategically and operationally - long before counterfeiters copy their products and brands or steal their technological know-how. They implement and execute a mix of strategically founded Anti-Counterfeiting measures. They know that only a consistent strategy enables effective and powerful activities. In Anti-Counterfeiting (ACF), the key for success is the combination of suitable measures that allow proactive and preventive activities. The challenge is a coherent and synchronized use of all the ACF-Instruments to achieve mutual completion and effect strengthening.

Components of ACF

Companies have to found their ACF-activities on a suitable competitive strategy and to build an integrated system of legal, organizational, technical and political countermeasures. This system has to be managed by an process-oriented organizational unit that has to monitor the effects of anti-counterfeiting in the markets permanently. The monitoring system delivers a fast feedback and allows the company to react immediately to the latest infringers' activities. Thus an ACF- system has the following main components: 1) analysis of situation, 2) definition of objectives, 3) strategy definition, 4) measures and 5) control of results.

Combination of Measures

The various measures of anti-counterfeiting are varied effective in terms of time. Intellectual property rights, for example, may have a weak but immediate effect. And technological barriers are also immediately effective, whereas training programs have usually a middle-term, lobbying with the Chinese government even a long-term effect. The graphic gives an outline of the time-related effects of selected measures. Building an ACF-system, it is vital to combine and integrate always short-, medium- and long-term measures to cover the whole lifecycle of a protected product, concept or brand.

Single measures are never sufficient to protect companies with a long-lasting effect. European companies have to integrate legal, organizational, technological and political ACF-measures to generate a powerful and lasting protection system. Only the strategy-based combination of tools creates a sufficient effect.

Regarding anti-counterfeiting measures, a company has to answer the following questions:

What measures are relevant for our business?
What combinations (bundles) of measures have the best effect?
What about the cost-benefit-ratio of particular measurement bundles?

We assume that the Pareto-rule is also valid in anti-counterfeiting: 20 % of the measures deliver 80 % of protection. The challenge is to identify the right 20 %.