As the counterfeit trade booms, companies are rolling out massive campaigns to get people to stop buying fakes. But the messages they use are often off the mark.
Companies have tried everything from threatening prosecution to linking phony products with organized crime. But marketers often don’t pay attention to what actually drives people in particular markets to buy counterfeits and what messages will actually work to curb demand of fake goods.
Companies, for instance, might roll out ads in a country stressing that fake products are of poor quality. But those ads might ignore the fact that local consumers have little disposable income and consider knockoffs a bargain—so they are willing to accept a price-quality trade-off. A better approach might be to stress that the phony goods, such as fake cigarettes, are funding terrorism or, in the case of counterfeit pharmaceuticals, are actually killing people.
To figure out how companies can improve their antipiracy marketing, we surveyed consumers in five large markets—Brazil, Russia, India, China and the U.S.—to see what would make them opt for knockoffs. Then we used that information to figure out what messages might get people to stop buying the illegitimate goods.
Why Consumers Buy
We presented consumers in each market with five possible motivations for buying counterfeits in two categories—movies and drugs—and asked them to rank the factors on a seven-point scale of importance. Here’s what they said about each.
1. Quality and performance. Consumers would buy a fake if they thought it was just as good as a legitimate product.
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Only U.S. consumers ranked this as an important factor that would influence them. Elsewhere, this attribute was just “somewhat” important—and Russian consumers ranked it not important at all. Astonishingly, consumers in these country markets valued the quality of the fake medicine less than they did factors such as reduced price and availability.
On the other hand, the quality of bootleg movies was ranked as very important for Russian, Brazilian and Chinese consumers, and less so for people in the U.S. and India.
2. Cost. Consumers would buy a fake because they cannot afford a genuine product.
Not surprisingly, almost all consumers ranked this as a very important motivation for pursuing fake drugs and bootleg movies
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Seems to me that whether or not to buy a fake has to do with one’s financial situation. Low income people obviously can’t afford the real thing. So if the perceived quality of the fake is good and the price is right, it makes sense that they would accept it. Higher income people are a bit more complicated. Those who are thrifty might be fine with the fake. And think of this, too: remember that cubic zirconium stuff that can pass as a diamond? It is known that the very wealthy prefer wearing this kind of jewelry because if it is lost, stolen, or damaged, the monetary loss is much less.