Holograms Still Win: The Cheapest Insurance Your Brand Can Buy

There comes a point in every successful brand’s life when somebody in senior management discovers counterfeiting.

It is usually triggered by one of three events.

First, the legal team forwards a link to an online marketplace where your product appears to be sold by “Premium Original Best UK Ltd”, based in a shed somewhere outside Shenzhen, at half your recommended retail price.

Second, a major retailer hints that they are “seeing a few quality issues” and suggests, in that charmingly quiet way only buyers manage, that perhaps you might wish to tighten your product integrity before the next range review.

Third, a regulator makes gentle enquiries about how you are protecting consumers, and you realise that “we use a lovely font and a very determined logo” is not, strictly speaking, a security strategy.

At that moment, a subject that has lived for years in the long grass of “nice idea, not urgent” suddenly looks suspiciously like risk management. That is when holograms shuffle into view, trying not to look smug.

Not the cheap rainbow sticker that came on pirate CDs in the 1990s, but modern engineered holographic and micro-optic features, the sort that sit quietly on banknotes, tax stamps, identity documents and high-value packaging.

They are, bluntly, the cheapest insurance your brand is ever likely to buy.

You are more attractive than you think

If you make products that are swallowed, rubbed in, plugged in, bolted on or poured over ice, you are interesting to counterfeiters.

Beauty and skincare, wellness and supplements, spirits and wine, baby products, electricals and spares, auto parts, tools, industrial consumables, high-value documents and tickets, all of these attract people whose business model is simple. Let the brand owner do all the tedious work of formulation, testing, certification, packaging and marketing, then imitate the outer shell and sell whatever you like inside it.

From their perspective your brand is not a proud achievement. It is a free product

development department.

In that context, a pack design that relies on artwork alone, perhaps with a QR code bravely printed in ordinary ink, is essentially a polite invitation. Please copy me, and do try to get the spelling right.

Why holograms refuse to retire

Every few years something is announced that is supposed to replace holograms. Special inks, invisible digital marks, clever serial numbers, NFC, blockchain, sometimes strapped on to a bottle with missionary zeal.

Yet holographic and micro-optic features keep turning up on the serious work for one dull but important reason. They do several jobs at once, exceedingly cheaply.

First, they are obvious. A well designed device gives movement, depth or colour shift that is hard to ignore even under the sort of lighting normally reserved for suburban garages. The person on the loading dock, the cashier in the corner shop, the warehouse picker swinging a pallet at six in the morning, can see it without training, software or an app store.

Second, they scale. Once the design and master are made, the running cost per label or stripe is measured in pence and stays there at industrial volumes. Holograms run quite happily at the sort of numbers that make print managers cry.

Third, they raise the cost to the attacker. The point is not mystical “unclonability”. It is

something more practical. If you use sub-micrometre structures, multiple visual effects and sensible integration into the pack, then a proper copy needs specialist kit, a good lab and someone who knows what they are doing. Many counterfeiters are very enterprising, but they are also very lazy. Faced with a choice between imitating the brand with the engineered hologram and the one with a flat label and a hopeful QR code, they tend to follow the path of least resistance.

You do not need perfection. You just need their life to be a bit more difficult than yours.

“Aren’t holograms a bit tacky?”

They can be. So can typography, if you let accounts choose it.

The cheap rainbow square slapped on as an afterthought is not flattering. The fault lies not in the technology but in the brief. If you treat the security feature as a last-minute sticker, it will look exactly like one.

Handled properly, the hologram becomes part of the visual language of the brand. It can sit under, through or around the logo. It can echo shapes and colours already in the design. It can move in ways that reinforce the brand story, whether that is purity, performance or a general sense that someone has taken the trouble to engineer the details.

One or two effects can be kept as quiet party tricks for people who inspect things

professionally. A hidden image that appears under a torch at low angle. A tiny character that only shows under a loupe. A change that appears when the pack is tilted. None of this has to shout. In fact, the less it shouts, the more convincing it tends to be.

If your marketing team still flinch when they hear the word “hologram”, it is usually because they have only been exposed to the discount end of the market.

“We do digital now”

Splendid. Keep doing it.

Digital authentication is extremely useful. Serialised codes, portal checks, NFC and the rest provide data, audit trails and patterns you can analyse. They tell you where odd things are happening in the supply chain.

What they do not do, on their own, is prevent anyone from copying the entire visual

appearance of the pack and printing the same codes, often with touching accuracy.

Digital systems work best when the physical object is allowed to do some of the heavy

lifting. A decent rule of thumb is that the hologram or micro-optic element is the lock.

the digital layer is the visitor’s book.

The warehouse operative can check the physical feature in one second without network

coverage. If it passes that basic test, the code can be scanned and validated. If it fails, no one wastes time interrogating a database about something that is clearly wrong before it has even reached the scanner.

What the numbers really look like

The argument for holograms can sound emotional. In practice, it is deeply boring and

financial, which is exactly what you want.

Imagine you ship ten million units a year. A proper engineered holographic label or stripe

might add between two and five pence per pack. Your annual spend is in the region of two hundred to five hundred thousand pounds.

In exchange you get a visible, testable device that helps your own people, your distributors and your retailers to reject suspicious stock before it reaches consumers. You get a credible answer when regulators, auditors or insurers ask what you actually did to protect the public. You give casual counterfeiters a firm hint to go and bother somebody less organised.

Now think about the cost of one medium-sized recall, one painful public incident caused by a fake product carrying your brand, or one major retailer concluding that life would be simpler if they devoted that shelf space to a competitor.

Viewed like that, the hologram is not an indulgence. It is the cheapest part of your reputation budget.

How to avoid making a mess of it

There are a few simple ways to stop a security project turning into an expensive science

experiment.

Keep the brief short. Three clear aims are more than enough. For example, an easy check at arm’s length, one hidden feature for inspectors, and no full redesign of the pack.

Involve design at the beginning. If you present the feature as an ugly compliance sticker that has to be stuck somewhere, the design team will hate it on principle and the result will prove them right. If you show them what is possible early, they will usually create something far better than you had in mind.

Insist on a clear technical pack from the supplier. You want a description of the effects,

simple inspection instructions, handling guidelines and examples of good and bad

impressions. Security without documentation is theatre.

Pilot on one product, in one region, with one channel. Watch how your own people use it.

Improve the instructions and training before you roll it out more widely.

Above all, resist the urge to promise the board that this will eliminate counterfeiting. It will not. Nothing will. What it will do, if you implement it sensibly, is reduce the volume and push the remaining attempts into the category that regulators, courts and insurers describe as deliberate, determined and rather obviously fraudulent.

Which is exactly where you want them.

When you can politely decline

There are a few cases where a hologram is genuinely unnecessary. Ultra-low-value goods

with no brand equity. Internal products that never leave a closed and heavily controlled

environment. Private-label work where your customer specifies and manages security

themselves.

If you are outside those niches and your brand appears in public with any frequency, it is

difficult to make a serious case against spending a few pence per pack on a feature that has quietly underwritten banknotes and identity documents for decades.

It will not win awards. No one will write poetry about your microstructured foil. In a perfect world, nobody will talk about it at all, because nothing dramatic will happen.

That is, of course, the point.

Good insurance is the line item nobody notices until the day they cannot imagine having gone without it. Holograms, done properly, live in that category. They make life fractionally more difficult for the people who want to trade on your name, and considerably more comfortable for the people who have to stand up in public and say that you did everything reasonable to protect your customers.

For the price of a biscuit tin in the marketing budget, that is not a bad deal.

By Guri Dhillon

Co-Founder, XRD Nano Limited

About XRD Nano

XRD Nano is a London-based engineering company developing UV nanoimprint equipment and advanced chemistries that make it easier to manufacture better optical films at scale, with less drama on the production line.

More at www.xrdnano.com

Subscribe