Methods to Authenticate Luxury Products: Identifying Key Features and Most Recognized Deficits

Abstract

AbstractLuxury products are expensive goods of high quality that are produced in limited quantities. Unsurprisingly, the problem of counterfeiting is especially high for such products, causing various issues for sellers and consumers. Therefore, product authentication represents an important endeavor. While traditional approaches such as expert-based product authentication are reliable but expensive, consumer-based approaches are cheaper but significantly more error-prone. Hence, the development of efficient approaches that also consider the advantages of modern technologies, such as, e.g., blockchains, provide high potential for improving the status quo. This work applies a mixed-method approach and reports about a quantitative survey in combination with expert interviews to identify common methods and key features from consumer and seller perspective when authenticating luxury products. This paper is an extended version of previous work presented at the International Conference on Future Data and Security Engineering (FDSE 2022). As such, it additionally provides insights on the most recognized deficits from consumer and seller perspective when authenticating luxury products. Results show that the knowledge of authentication methods is unevenly distributed between experts and consumers. While both consumers and experts are aware of traditional, serial number-based approaches, blockchain-enabled ways of product authentication are only known by experts. However, both groups tend to prefer digital ways of authentication and agree that sellers, followed by producers, and lastly consumers are responsible for ensuring authentic products. Consumers desire many additional features for product authentication than experts. Most desired features include tracking the sales history via, e.g., the blockchain or online directories, the traceability of ownership, or the possibility to conduct home tests for consumers. Most recognized deficits when authenticating luxury products are seen in the difficult implementation of thorough identification methods and the limited reliability of these methods. The results of the paper provide researchers and practitioners with a feature base for developing novel authentication approaches.