Purchase of counterfeit is often knowingly and leads to the purchase of authentic products

ABSTRACT As counterfeiting activity continues to thrive around the world, firms manufacturing genuine items work hard to discourage counterfeiting and protect their revenues. But the authors suggested the possibility that firms might benefit from counterfeits. The purpose of this research was to investigate the extent to which counterfeit items function as a promotion to increase sales of genuine items. Based on survey data from five luxury fashion product categories, Study 1 strongly confirmed that both consumers of counterfeit and genuine items generally prefer genuine items to counterfeits, that consumers of genuine items do not have a stronger intention to buy counterfeits than nonconsumers of genuine items, and that consumers of counterfeits also have a stronger purchase intention for the genuine items than nonconsumers of counterfeits. But the purchase intent difference between genuine and counterfeit items was smaller for consumers of counterfeits than for consumers of genuine items. Based on experimental data from two luxury handbag brands, Study 2 generally repeated the results of Study 1, but showed that when price information is provided the preference of genuine items diminishes, resulting in no significant difference from the preference of counterfeits. In addition, the hypothesis that consumers of counterfeits will show stronger intention to buy genuine items than will nonconsumers of counterfeits was not supported with price information given. Key words: Counterfeits, counterfeiting, genuine items, fashion, luxury Do Counterfeits Promote Genuine Products? Counterfeiting activity is a worldwide phenomenon rapidly increasing in every country, developing or developed. Counterfeits are now estimated to account for 5% to 7% of world trade (Business News 2005a). Counterfeiting is defined as “the act of producing or selling a product containing an intentional and calculated reproduction of a genuine trademark. A ‘counterfeit mark’ is identical to or substantially indistinguishable from a genuine mark” (McCarthy 2004). A counterfeit is called by many different names such as knock-off, imitation, fake, bogus, copy, copycat, and overrun, which are a little bit different in exact meaning but not different in creating similar problems to businesses (Wilke and Zaichkowsky 1999). Product categories being counterfeited include designer apparels, accessories, pharmaceuticals, computer memory chips, automobile parts, motorcycles, cell phones, cigarettes, liquor, tea, golf clubs, video game controllers, music, movies, and computer software, to name a few. Counterfeits of some product categories threaten consumer safety, often resulting in fatalities. For example, counterfeit airplane parts, recycled from downed airplanes, become a major source of plane crashes (Maloo and Darrow 2001). Counterfeit drugs account for five percent of all medicines, seriously damaging human lives and public health (Wechsler 2002). According to the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, it is estimated that counterfeiting costs the United States $200 billion annually (The U.S. House of Representatives 2005). And Chinese counterfeits alone cost the U.S., Europe, and Japan more than $60 billion in retail sales (Time 2005). In summary, counterfeiting activity has been understood to be negative as damaging brand reputations, revenues, and profits; undermining research and development and marketing costs; threatening human lives; increasing legal fees to prosecute counterfeiters; and raising product prices (see Wee, Tan, and Cheok 1995). Accordingly, practitioners, researchers, and policy makers have paid a great amount of attention to developing strategies to discourage counterfeiting and protect the victims of counterfeiting. Various anti-counterfeiting measures have been proposed and implemented, including international treaties and enforcement of intellectual property rights to prosecute counterfeiters, use of multiple labeling and packaging techniques to make counterfeiting difficult, consumer education via a warning through an advertising campaign, tight control of retail stores, and consultations with both government agencies and other industry manufacturers (Chaudhury and Walsh 1996; Collins-Dodd and Zaichkowsky 1999). The documentary episode of a CEO’s anticounterfeiting operations in Thailand provides a clear illustration on the difficulty, complexity, and danger of fighting counterfeiters (Green and Smith 2002). Despite such efforts, counterfeiting continues to thrive around the world because of worldwide growing demand for well-known brands, lack of consumer and counterfeiter morality, technological advances enabling counterfeiting, production and distribution capabilities in less developed countries, and inadequate penalties for counterfeiters (Business Week 2005a; Wee et al. 1995). While firms are often unsuccessfully struggling with counterfeiting, however, some researchers have examined with cautions the possibility that firms might benefit from counterfeits because consumers of counterfeits might become buyers of genuine items. Such a possibility was examined, in particular, in computer software piracy. For example, Conner and Rumelt (1991) argued that piracy increases the number of program users, and the existence of pirated software stimulates an interest in legal copies. In conclusion, they objected to software protection because it decreases the number of users. Givon, Mahajan, and Muller (1995) found that the sales of genuine word processors and spreadsheets in the United Kingdom significantly increased because of active word-of-mouth resulting from pirates. Furthermore, Maltz and Chiappetta (2002) object to eliminating software pirates because they can help firms identify useful technologies. Two questions arise from the studies of software piracy. First, can the same findings be found in other product categories, especially luxury fashion product categories, which are the biggest counterfeit item categories? For example, in the UK, more than 64 per cent of the UK Customs seizure cases were fashion products, and of these cases, 17.5 per cent were fake Louis Vuitton goods (The Financial Times 2005). Likewise, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports fashion products as a major product type of counterfeiting. Second, pirated software functions in exactly the same way as the genuine item, but counterfeited fashion products do not. They are more often disposable, fall apart, and are inferior in all aspects except for brand name, although the quality of some counterfeits can be occasionally as high as that of the genuine items (Gentry et al. 2001). Therefore, it will be important to investigate whether or not counterfeiting of fashion products helps the sales of genuine items, as observed in the case of software piracy