COUNTERFEIT GOODS

Study finds ways to reduce consumer demand for counterfeit luxury goods

By our African Marketing Confederation News Team | 2024

Luxury brands may benefit from including more educational elements about their brand history and craftsmanship in their marketing messaging.

Connoisseurs of high-end fashion and luxury goods may feel confident in their ability to spot a knockoff or discern the finer details of a genuine article. But does that self-assured knowledge make them more or less likely to partake in a fake?

It’s a question that marketing managers in the luxury industry are eager to answer as part of their quest against counterfeit products.

“Many consumers have concerns about the immorality and unethicality of counterfeits, but they still purchase them knowing it is wrong,” says Ludovica Cesareo, Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Lehigh University College of Business in the US.

Understanding how people’s self-assessed knowledge of luxury goods affects their moral stance toward counterfeits can help shape strategies to combat the scourge, Cesareo said. She and her colleague, Silvia Bellezza of Columbia University in the US, examined the issue in a new study published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

Photo by Harper Sunday from Pexels

Perceived knowledge affects morality

The luxury market has long been driven by consumers’ beliefs in the quality, craftsmanship and heritage of products. The researchers hypothesised that consumers with high ‘subjective knowledge’ – how much people think they know about a domain – in this arena would be less drawn to counterfeits. Those with lower subjective knowledge, they hypothesised, would be more likely to find counterfeit products appealing.

Across four experiments assessing consumer’s subjective knowledge and attitudes toward counterfeits, the researchers found that those with low subjective knowledge were indeed more likely to be drawn to counterfeit goods.

“Those not particularly knowledgeable in high-end fashion and luxury goods like counterfeits more than fashion-savvy consumers, and they are more likely to post on social media about the original brand,” Cesareo says. “This phenomenon is due to low-knowledge consumers’ greater ability to disengage from moral concerns about counterfeits.”

People often justify behaviours that they know are wrong using ‘moral disengagement’, a psychological process that involves tactics such as ethical rationalisation, diffusing responsibility, or downplaying potential consequences.

Cesareo explains that ‘low-knowledge’ consumers may not understand as much about the provenance of items but may remain attracted to the look and prestige of luxury brands, as well as the cachet they carry on social media.

Whereas consumers with high-level knowledge about the origins, processes and details of luxury goods are more likely to hold consistent moral views on counterfeits, low-knowledge consumers can more easily be swayed to feel counterfeits are justifiable.

“Not only do low-knowledge consumers not view counterfeits through a moral lens, but they also see a higher cost-benefit of the counterfeit than high-knowledge consumers,” Cesareo explains.

The study also demonstrated that low-knowledge consumers can more easily be influenced by messaging about the relative morality of counterfeiting.

Advice for marketers and managers

The researchers’ advice for marketers and management teams:

In markets with mostly low-knowledge consumers, companies should aim to influence consumers’ perceptions of the morality of counterfeiting through education. Strategies could include targeted advertising and communication campaigns by governmental agencies highlighting the immorality and illegality of purchasing counterfeits.

To fight counterfeits in markets with mostly high-knowledge consumers, make consumers even more knowledgeable by being more informative in advertising and communication campaigns. While most luxury advertising focuses on symbolic imagery and ephemerality, luxury brands would benefit from including more educational elements about their brand history and explanations of craftsmanship.

“A key issue for marketers and brand managers is to understand how to channel their anti-counterfeiting efforts, depending on the level of knowledge of a specific target market,” Cesareo emphasises.