No Opportunity cost --- Consumers who buy counterfeit won’t buy genuine.
Ritson '07 [Mark, brand consultant, marketing professor, with a PhD in Marketing, taught on the MBA programmes of leading business schools including London Business School and MIT, writes a column on marketing for almost 20 years, won the PPA Business Columnist of the Year four times, he teaches the Marketing Week Mini MBAs in Marketing and Brand Management, "Counterfeits: Good For Luxury Brands?", 10-03-2007, Branding Strategy Insider, https://brandingstrategyinsider.com/fakes-can-genui/, Accessed; 7-28-24, AS]
The luxury goods market is tipped to grow to £1trillion in global sales by 2010. With the top luxury brands enjoying operating margins of 60%-70%, it’s not hard to see why many marketers view counterfeit products as the biggest threat to these brands.
In reality, they are no such thing. The first flawed assumption is that a consumer who buys a fake would have otherwise purchased the genuine article – this is hogwash. A woman does not buy a Hermès Birkin bag for £10,000 because she needs a handbag. She wants the brand and for all the utilitarian verisimilitude of a £200 copy from Shanghai, this is something even the best fakes cannot offer.
It’s true that millions of fake luxury handbags are sold each year. But very few of them, if any, cannibalize the sales of the real thing. Davenport Lyons reports that in 2006 only 20% of purchasers of fake brands would have bought the genuine article. I suspect even this figure is an exaggeration.