Karan Rai is Chief Technology Officer at Ennoventure Inc.
Most high-end brands have one common enemy—brand identity theft. They are a part of the $11.36 billion industry, and the market doesn’t seem to slow down.
In the world of AI, where creating (fake) products takes only a couple of hours, it is easy for brands to lose business. From product synthesizing to implementing vocal mannerisms, it is easy for fraudsters to steal a brand’s product and overall identity. Unfortunately, this is not a one-time default either—fraudsters can easily deploy recurrent neural networks to learn the product features, its advertising elements, brand colors and others to create a brand new product and fake that is eerily similar to the original one.
This fake product and overall brand identity can lead to a drop in customer loyalty, recall and, ultimately, revenue loss. Having a counterfeit in the market makes the brand less trustworthy and valuable and can be an imminent threat to the brand perception, which may take years to remedy.
While high-end brands have the monetary bandwidth to be identity gatekeepers and curtail losses, brand identity theft spells disaster for small- to medium-sized businesses looking to make a mark in the consumer-driven industry.
The calculated process of brand theft can be countered with a proactive approach to brand protection.
Ways To Ensure Proactive Brand Protection
AI-image Recognition: AI-driven image recognition is a great way to optimize surveillance of counterfeit products across the digital space. ML models can be trained to find product images similar to original products and detect discrepancies such as incorrect fonts, wrong visual placement and wrong listing, to name a few.
Cryptographic Signature: Brands can strengthen their protection with cryptographic signatures. These can be applied as invisible signatures all over the packaging of the original brands’ products. These signatures cannot be replicated and can be authenticated within seconds using a smartphone. An additional advantage of these signatures is that they do not disrupt the production or printing process.
Social Listening: AI applications such as sentiment analysis and NLP for detecting intents and context can monitor conversations around the product and track any adverse comments signaling a potential link to copies or counterfeit manufacturers. Noted fashion brands have taken the help of NLP to track communication related to their original products across social media or online review platforms and get real-time alerts against violations.
How AI Is Contributing To Brand Protection
Brand protection has traditionally comprised labels, holograms and QR codes, which are all easy to copy. Al is leveling up the game, making it harder for counterfeiters and increasing product traceability. With AI models acquiring the capability to be run on edge devices, the technology is going to become as ubiquitous as QR scanners and will power our smartphones with faster, reliable and accurate brand protection tools, leading to a safer environment for customers to buy their products with confidence.
Brand protection should be integral to a brand’s strategy from the early stages rather than just an afterthought, as it’s harder and more expensive to apply it when the product has already scaled and, therefore, more vulnerable to counterfeiting. Better safe than sorry.
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