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Executive Summary
Counterfeits are often viewed as robbing a new sale from the genuine item, implying that consumers would have purchased the genuine item in the absence of a counterfeit. However, such a narrow statement underestimates the full impact of counterfeits, particularly on preexisting alliances between brands and genuine-item consumers. Counterfeits have a distressing impact on the brand relationships of consumers who purchase genuine items. Data from India and Thailand suggest that in the case of fashion brands, genuine-item consumers will be disenchanted with a brand when it is counterfeited and will show little sympathy for the brand. Some will swiftly switch to another brand, and others will turn the focus away from brands altogether, recasting their purchase decisions as moral choices that have little to do with previously cherished relationships with brands. In either case, the brands in question will be abruptly marginalized. Consumers’ portentous alignment with fashion brands in general suggests that parting is not always easy. The restlessness associated with ending a brand relationship suggests that consumers deem this to be a last resort, and there is role for brand strategy to forestall such dramatic responses of genuine-item consumers in the face of counterfeiting. In addition, the intensity of such responses suggests that brand managers must consider the impact on genuine-item consumers in determining the total impact of counterfeits. This broadened view will facilitate a brand’s fight against counterfeits both in brand strategy and in law, in which the loss of utility experienced by genuine-item consumers receives scant attention.

Biography
Suraj Commuri is an assistant professor in the School of Business and affiliate faculty in the Department of Informatics at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Before academia, he worked as a project manager, overseeing consumer brand research to aid new market entry for several leading multinational brands. His research has also appeared in Journal of Consumer Research. His ongoing research examines collaborative listening in the case of product and brand discussions in consumer-generated content on social Web sites.

Journal of Marketing, Volume 73, Number 3, May 2009
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