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NFC technology companies have promoted the idea of using NFC tags to foil counterfeiters of luxury goods for some time.
Now more companies are proposing to combine the antipiracy technology with brand-marketing messages.
The latest is U.S.-based app developer ClikGenie, working with a tag supplier and printer, which have produced an app that authenticates wine labels while also enabling vineyards and other wine brand promoters to send consumers more information via a tap of their NFC phones.
ClikGenie along with NFC tag supplier Smartrac and chip encoder and label printer FineLine Technologies recently released CLIKSecure, an NFC product authentication app that the companies say combines tag-based product authentication with merchandising. The app adds an anticounterfeiting feature to ClikGenie’s lineup, which had focused mainly on mobile merchandising and promotion using 2-D bar codes.
The companies demonstrated the application for wine authentication at last month’s Global Secure Summit in Istanbul, Turkey. FineLine CEO George Hoffman told NFC Times that CLIKSecure’s partners are working with customers in the luxury apparel and wine industries, though he declined to name any clients, he said, for fear of alerting counterfeiters.
“We think any high-end product that attracts counterfeiters is a viable market,” Hoffman told NFC Times, citing pharmaceuticals, tobacco products, and software as examples.
The NFC tags use a chip from NXP semiconductors. NXP, like rival NFC chip supplier Inside Secure, sees a market for using NFC to thwart product counterfeiters.
Last February, Inside introduced an upgrade to its anticounterfeiting chip technology. The new chip, which Inside calls VaultC160, includes memory space for both anticounterfeiting technology and product information. Consumers could tap to check an authentication certificate to confirm the originality of a luxury handbag, wine or watch while also downloading product pictures or recipes, according to Inside.
The CLIKSecure app backers chose fine wine for the recent demonstration because of growing counterfeit losses in the wine market. Premium wines can sell for a few hundred dollars a bottle, with especially prestigious vintages fetching prices in the thousands.
European wine exporters are being hit especially hard by counterfeiters, with an expanding luxury goods market in China driving demand there for knockoff products, including wine. Chinese wine drinkers consume 100 million cases a year, twice as much as in 2005, according to French wine industry group Vinexpo.
Decades-Long Problem
Wine counterfeiting is not a new problem, however. The most basic method, printing a fake label with a subtly misspelled brand name or a slightly different logo in hopes of fooling buyers, is common to other luxury-goods markets prone to counterfeiting, including apparel and accessories. More ambitious counterfeiters might remove an authentic label and place it on a bottle with a similar shape, usually from the same vineyard, which contains a cheaper wine. Savvy buyers might identify the fake if the cork does not match the label.