Acronyms and anagrams are excellent means to simplify a message and to provide easy recall of this message (thus, the word “mnemonic” [Greek origin]—assisting or intended to assist the memory). For example, in 3^rd Grade, I figured out that my last name was an anagram for “KISS ME”. And I conveyed this knowledge to all of my female classmates. Which, not coincidentally, leads us to discussing the mnemonic SLAP.

SLAP, in the case of producing an effective ecosystem for brand protection and anti-counterfeiting, is an acronym for Scalable, Logical, Analytical, and Progressive.

Scalable means that the solution you propose can be used on multiple production runs, multiple products (SKUs), and for a reasonable amount of time. Don’t try to “divide and conquer”—that is, don’t use a completely different approach on different products. It will confuse your customers, your retailers, and your inspectors. Not only will it make it more difficult for you to get good authentication feedback, but you actually may increase the perception that your products are being counterfeited. Product “A” has deterrents 1, 2 and 3 on it, but Product “B” has deterrents 4, 5 and 6 on it—hmmm, one of these is probably fake. Or, worse yet, the would-be authenticator simply tunes out—too complicated, not worth it, too hard to figure out how to authenticate the product. Keep the message simple, and use an innate moving target for deterrence rather than actually changing the target. Security Variable Data Printing (SVDP) is such an innate moving target. One can change the information embedded in the security print, but never change the way a user interacts with it. And, because SVDP affords so many different means of embedding trackable and authenticable data, it is innately scalable, as well.

Logical means, well, think! Don’t make it easy on the counterfeiters. Here are some illogical approaches: (1) Spend a lot on your deterrent (counterfeiters love these “high margin” deterrents, because they’ll always knock them off more cheaply, and it decreases your margins while increasing theirs); (2) Use a deterrent/approach for only a short while and then stop using it (now your would-be authenticators don’t know what to expect—was it the old deterrent or the new deterrent, and which is legitimate). Much more logical: any time you roll out a new deterrent, which is unavoidable for some products—educate your authenticators; (3) Confuse different utilities in a familiar approach. Using variable data inside a hologram is one such example—most users think holograms are “variable” already, and aren’t likely to even notice the fact that one hologram is different from another; (4) Confuse machine vs. human readability. If you use a deterrent intended for machine reading, then embed data in a way that machines can read better than humans. And vice versa. Humans, for example, are very good at noticing alignment differences and relative color differences. Mach bands and other optical illusions are entirely invisible to machines. Machines are much better at noticing absolute color differences and of course steganographics such as watermarks. Meaning metamerisms are mainly meant for machines (alliterative, no?).

Analytical means your approach to the ecosystem should be geared at generating quantitative data. What is the compliance rate (i.e. what percentage of would-be authenticators actually try to authenticate)? What is the counterfeit rate? Read failure rate? If you can’t disambiguate these latter two—counterfeit vs. read rate, that is—you do not have an analytical solution. SVDP again underpins such an analysis: a counterfeit sample will generally have a different combination of print quality, print forensics and payload (data to be read) than a legitimate but unreadable—e.g. damaged, read with poor lighting, etc.—sample. Because of the multiple modalities—color, saturation, intensity, steganographics, halftoning, etc.—involved in printing, SVDP provides many on-ramps for analytics.

Progressive, finally, means that your approach allows progressively more complicated analysis to proceed smoothly. From an imaging standpoint, this means we move from image quality assessment (image “grading”) to image inspection to image authentication to, finally, image forensics. At each stage, a more in-depth analysis—and thus more difficult to reproduce—of the printed material is obtained. Making the first stage, image grading, relatively fast and painless, is an excellent way to generate “leads” from your customers. HP and many other brands address this by using “high-end” overt deterrents on their packaging. Customers are familiar with the motif—color-shift, thermochromic, etc.—and so notice when these have been unsuccessfully knocked off. Inspection ties layout and partial authentication to quality. Authentication ties the print job to the database of legitimate products. Forensics ties the data to the very material printed on, as discussed in my previous blog.

We can now add “SLAP” to the list of SVDP-related mnemonics, which also includes ACID (May 19)—All Content Is Dynamic—and PRACTICE (May 12)—Plan, Research, Activate, Collect, Train, Investigate, Convict, Evolve. Hopefully, this helps you recall a logical approach to brand protection. If not, well then, TTFN!