During a recent webinar hosted by De La Rue on the subject of what motivates the adoption of a brand protection solution, Bea Morrison, Director of Marketing of the distinguished British beauty brand Mason Pearson spoke about her company’s decision to implement a comprehensive solution against parallel trade.
Mason Pearson’s brand protection solution, provided by De La Rue, comprises a security label with IZON® Lippmann hologram and serialised QR code, in combination with the Traceology® 3.0 track and trace platform.
This is what she had to say.
We are a longstanding, family-owned British company of almost 140 years old. We have the enviable reputation of offering the Rolls Royce of hairbrushes. We hand- make every single brush from start to finish, and release a small, select number of products into the market every year.
Traditionally, our brushes have been sold through a longstanding distribution network. Our US distributor, for example, has been our partner since the 1920s. The distributors sell the products to high-end pharmacies and luxury department stores.
However, the rapid growth of the internet has had a detrimental effect on our business. A flood of our products are now being parallel imported, with a distributor in one territory exporting products into another territory. Suddenly, our hairbrushes are appearing on discount sites, marketplaces, and discount retailers like Walmart, which has triggered a massive price war that is driving prices down.
We also find there is a total lack of professional advice when purchasing products from an online store. Products are often mis-described and mis-sold, with customers receiving the wrong model, size, or colour. This has inevitably ended up with customers complaining to us, since marketplaces do not want to deal with them.
All of these factors are potentially cheapening our brand and could ultimately destroy our reputation if left unchecked.
This is why we have implemented a solution to protect both our brand reputation and our customers.
For a few years now, we have been working with a brand protection agency, which provides us with an online platform with a multitude of marketplace listings that we continually monitor to see where our products are being sold. This solution has been somewhat successful but doesn’t actually get to the root of the problem, given that as soon as a listing is removed from one marketplace it tends to pop up on another one.
So we needed to find a rapid and effective solution that went beneath the surface to confront the parallel trading and cross- border selling activities at the source of these online listings.
To this end, we carried out a long fact- gathering exercise to identify what we were actually looking for, and spoke to a number of companies providing track and trace technology.
Ultimately, it was De La Rue that came up with a really workable solution. While the technology is complex, the actual solution is easy to use, which is very important to us, as a traditional business.
The solution is a combination of the ‘offline’ IZON hologram label – which is affixed to every box of every single product – and an online system that records the unique number on each label together with accompanying product information.
We now know exactly which brush was shipped to which customer. Furthermore, the end consumer is able to scan the label with their smartphone in order to log their purchase on a landing page, which gives us information on where the product was sold. We check this information on a daily basis, by means of a dashboard, and it’s very interesting to see the results.
It’s only been a few months since we’ve been using the system but we’re certainly seeing good results. We have already flushed out some culprits and ruffled a few feathers, which is exactly what we wanted to achieve.
Our distributors were on the whole ecstatic about the solution because, while our company doesn’t have a problem with counterfeits, we do, as previously mentioned, have a massive problem with parallel trade and cross-market selling, which disrupts the local market and undercuts prices.
As a result of what we found out through the solution, we have discontinued supplying a couple of our distributors, and on the whole, we’re confident that, in time, we can sort the market out in the right direction.
Another favourable result pertains to the huge feedback we received from end consumers scanning the QR code on the label, and this despite us not yet having an incentive scheme in place to make the scanning worthwhile.
We’ve got a little comments box on our landing page that consumers have posted on, with comments ranging from ‘so excited to try the first Mason Pearson brush’ to complaints about receiving the wrong product. But this is all valuable information.
As a word of advice, I would recommend that companies implement brand protection solutions as soon as they can, without waiting for market situations to deteriorate. In our case, it was not until the market was flooded with product that shouldn’t have been there that we implemented a brand protection system, by which time you could say we were too late.
Also, the more layers you can add to your solution, the better, in terms of both physical security and digital traceability. That way, you will be protected from all sides.
Our current solution provides an effective combination of traditional label with online technology, which works very well for us. We’ve therefore just recently renewed our commitment with De La Rue for another three years.
To watch the whole webinar find out more at www.delarue.com/authentication
