Plan Ahead

Brand fraud costs the world economy billions of dollars each year, as consumers are deceived by inferior and possibly harmful knockoffs of luxury goods, medicines, and consumer products. With monetary damage like this—and even more severe consequences, such as in the case of bogus medicine—it is essential that package printers and converting companies take proactive steps to protect their customers’ brands and products from external threats. In fact, the protection process must begin long before final products leave the plant floor. Product packaging itself can have a substantial impact on brand security—this is where package printing comes into the equation.

Since packaging is often a consumer’s first physical interaction with a retail product, adding security features to the package itself is the first line of defense in the battle for brand protection, allowing consumers, retailers, and brand representatives alike to detect fraudulent products. Different levels of security are required based on the value of the product, leading to a variety of methods to facilitate brand protection. Some techniques may be copied and very few are 100 percent foolproof. However, the intent is to make fraud more difficult for people with criminal intent—and easier to detect for the end consumer.

What’s critical for package printers and converters is ensuring that they have a process in place to identify the best options for their customers and that they stay ahead of industry trends and technologies.

Assessing the threat and the value

Before reviewing actual technology options, printers should start by taking a close look at their customers and determining what kind of value security protection represents for them. They should ask themselves:

• What is the potential risk?

• What is the potential reward?

A good place to start, for example, is the current estimate of damages due to fraud. It’s also important to understand what could be tampered with in the future. For example, are their customers facing the threat of a “copycat” product in fake boxes? Or, refills in original boxes? There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all security solution; rather, it is very much a consultative sales process.

Matching the security features

When approaching the security topic from the packaging side, printers and their customers need to decide on implementing either overt or covert security features. Covert techniques are invisible to the untrained eye and often require the use of a special decoder, while anyone can recognize and appreciate overt techniques immediately. A third category consists of forensic techniques. However, they are used less often as they require scientific-grade decoders and are generally only applicable to the highest security levels.

Overt possibilities: “hide” it in the open

From a package printing standpoint, there are three primary ways to enhance security in the open:

• Using a special substrate;

• Using special inks or coatings; and

• Using special processes or -finishing operations that are difficult to copy and easy to identify.

Protection measures anyone can see have the added benefit of increasing consumer confidence, not to mention enhancing security. As overt security features are obvious, this approach is mainly about making the package harder to copy. That starts with the substrate itself—the more special the substrate is and the way it is printed and/or finished, the harder it becomes to copy. Good examples are plastic packages with lenticular surfaces featuring 3D effects or other very high-end (and typically expensive) materials with a unique touch and feel.

Another overt method is using a specialty process or specialty inks, such as incorporating foil components into the packaging through cold- or hot-foil stamping. Foil can carry an additional image or three-dimensional hologram that is difficult for a counterfeiter to reproduce. Some converters employ micro-embossing techniques to create a special appearance and texture in the substrate itself. Anyone can see and feel the embossing, and while the technique can be copied, it is difficult to do so convincingly. The same applies to specially formed diecuts, special scores, folds, or clear windows.

Another design element is a pearlescent coating. Very attractive to look at, these coatings change color depending on the angle of view. Printers can customize the metal content in the coating to get a special effect through a variety of methods: overprint it, underprint it, use UV, or conventional printing.

Printers may also use special inks that have a distinctive scent when rubbed or temperature-reacting inks that disappear or change color when touched by a warm human hand. Messages such as “rub here for citrus smell,” or “place hand here to check for original,” add an element of interactivity to the packaging. One special variety of such ink only reacts to rubbing with a coin.

Microprinting also can be effective in helping users avoid would-be counterfeiters who use simple photocopy machines to do their work. In microprinting, very small text appears to the eye as a line or a geometric pattern, when in reality a text message is hidden in the fine print, which if destroyed provides proof of tampering. Anyone who has scrutinized U.S. currency under a loupe or microscope has seen microtext—very small printing visible, but generally unreadable, to the naked eye. Printers and manufacturers concerned with brand protection can hide microtext anywhere on a package or create a text pattern than appears as a line.

Subtle folding, gluing, and assembly techniques, such as intentionally starting or stopping a crease line before the end, for example, can also help verify a brand’s authenticity. Any time a package printer can alter small details that create special effects without compromising quality, security will be enhanced. Something as simple as adding a seal to determine whether or a not a package has been opened also increases security. If the package is correct and the seal is not broken, then what’s inside must also be genuine. Even in this category, advanced choices are available such as self-destroying seals or labels that display a message once opened.

Covert techniques: More than meets the eye

Techniques that are not easily detected by the untrained eye have an extra layer of safety built in simply because counterfeiters may not even know the security measures exist. Usually some kind of decoder is needed to make a covert feature visible. Consider hidden images—by making minimal changes to the screening (typically in the cyan or magenta separation), an image invisible to the naked eye is inserted into the print. The hidden image is typically very hard to reproduce for a counterfeiter. A simple copy will generally lose the hidden image information.

Anyone using a decoder can detect the hidden image or pattern, thus verifying the authenticity of the packaging and brand identity. Depending on the technology employed, such decoders are inexpensive to produce in large numbers. Many are plastic and about the size of a credit card, so they are also easy to carry and use by anyone charged with safeguarding a brand. The main advantages of hidden images are that they don’t change the look of the original design and they can be printed with conventional offset technology. In advanced applications, a hidden image can even be printed with special coatings or pearlescent inks—adding yet another layer of security.

Other covert techniques include special screenings with a special dot form and different types of inks, varnishes, or coatings that are only visible under unique viewing or lighting circumstances such as blacklight (UV light). Another example is the use of metamerism—a phenomenon in which certain colors look the same under daylight conditions while appearing different under UV light.

Adding security features can also mean enhancing the “package experience” for the end consumer. Before deciding which technologies make the most sense for their customers, printers and converters should keep certain considerations in mind. Do the brand owners want the security feature to be permanent or for a one-time use only? Can they deliver a decoder for covert features? The key is having the right plan in place to meet the end objectives of the customer.

Customer presentation and other considerations

Once printers decide how to protect their customers’ brands, it’s crucial to make security features part of their presentation to the customer—including a risk analysis. Printers will want to address topics such as:

• What happens if despite your best efforts the carton is compromised?

• What is the risk of doing nothing at all?

Once companies become involved in brand protection and security, they should expect their customers to demand more from them as well. Printers will want to ensure that their plant setups and ethics policies support high security printing and that their risk management is handled accordingly. For those that engage in advanced security printing, customers may demand well-defined procedures for the supply, storage, manufacturing, and distribution of their cartons.

Stay up to date

Finally, it is a must for printers to stay up to date on the latest developments of security features. New trends emerge constantly, such as RFID (radio frequency identification) tagging of packages, or even individualized imprints that allow for easy identification.

Even though it might take a long time from the first customer conversation to printing a security-enabled package, once printers do it, their customers make a choice for the long run—a decision that can benefit both the customer and the printer. pP

Jörg Dähnhardt is the director of product management, very large format, for -Heidelberg USA, Inc.