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Pharmaceutical marketing, brand protection.

It could be used with the pharmaceutical marketing students and MBA students for analysing counterfeit medicines' menace in developing countries and positioning of a disruptive technology. The case could be used for marketing consultants, Brand managers and executive development programmes to explore issues such as protecting brands through technology, pharmaceutical packaging marketing, competitiveness of counterfeit drugs, global harmonisation.

Against the backdrop of rising menace of counterfeit drugs in developing countries, the case talks in particular about an innovative pharmaceutical packaging company. The company has developed a unique security technology called non-ClonableID™ which can enable products to be authenticated throughout the supply chain, thus protecting brands and preventing misuse. Despite a promising technology, it poses challenges regarding its adoption and commercial success.

Counterfeiting as an inevitable result of Globalization has become a global nuisance and has to be dealt at global level. Brand protection could be one of the lowest cost tools for pharmaceutical companies to restore public confidence in their products and themselves. While all methods for anti-counterfeiting are known to have short lives the menace still must be dealt with. For this, companies need to deploy anti-counterfeiting strategies that set up various layers of security.

Teaching note.

This paper seeks to investigate the fast‐growing problem of counterfeit prescription drugs and the steps being taken by both the private and public sectors to counteract it.

The author documents both the size and scope of the counterfeit pharmaceutical problem in the USA. The paper also looks at the steps being taken by pharmaceutical manufacturers and wholesalers, as well as legal efforts being undertaken by federal and state governments, to counteract the growing concerns over fake medicines being introduced into the pharmaceutical supply chain.

The paper builds the business case for radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to be employed to track pharmaceuticals in the supply chain and counter the growing threat of counterfeit drugs.

The principal limitation of this research is that it is being conducted on both a rapidly evolving problem (counterfeit pharmaceuticals) and the use of a rapidly developing technology (RFID) to counteract it. Thus, in time, the parameters of both the counterfeit drug problem and the technological solutions to it may shift dramatically.

The paper demonstrates that RFID provides the only effective method of providing “track and trace” electronic pedigrees for prescription drugs.

The paper is a valuable overview of the problems associated with the vulnerability of the pharmaceutical supply chain in the USA and the potential cost‐effective, life‐saving use of RFID to better secure prescription drugs, both in transit and in inventory.

This paper aims to analyze drug counterfeiting, explains its risk factors and operating and legal environments reviews recent legal cases and develops a multi-stakeholder prevention strategy that includes forensic accounting methods.

This is a theoretical study based on legal case studies and the best forensic accounting strategies.

Pharmaceutical drug counterfeiting is a fast-growing fraud that so far has attracted little attention from forensic accountants. A recent estimate projects that criminals collect around $75bn annually in illicit sales from counterfeit drugs (Bairu, 2015). Pharmaceutical counterfeiting also leads to the loss of lives when criminals use lethal chemicals in the manufacturing of fake medicines (Liang, 2006a; Brown, 2005). Because the detection of drug counterfeiting is extremely difficult after fake medicines have been ingested by patients, the strategy developed in this paper is based on early discovery by using reliable tracking technologies and inventory management controls in the supply chain, conducting effective regulatory and legitimate customs inspections, and increasing consumer awareness of basic forensic accounting tools.

This paper extends previous research by integrating various factors into a single multi-stakeholder prevention framework.

The paper presents a synthesized, comprehensive view of the drug fraud epidemic and analyzes concrete steps that can be taken to protect the pharmaceutical supply chain to reduce the loss of lives and monetary injuries.

No previous research has analyzed this issue from a multi-stakeholder point of view and used forensic accounting tools to complement a prevention strategy. The drug counterfeiting prevention strategy developed in this paper addresses the supply side, the regulatory enforcement side and the demand side.

The purpose of this paper is to guide marketing managers in their efforts to decrease consumer demand for counterfeits of their products by examining the consumer beliefs and attitudes that have been found to support consumer complicity across multiple products, in virtual and physical shopping environments, using several criteria of complicity for each product.

A web‐based survey of 254 students explored two ethical ideologies (idealism and relativism), collectivism, and two attitudes toward counterfeits (ethical concern and perceived quality) with respect to two counterfeit products (movies and pharmaceuticals) and reported respondents' complicity in both a virtual and physical marketplace for each good.

Consumer complicity – a consumer's willingness to obtain, share, or use counterfeit products – was predicted by the consumers' hedonic shopping experience and lack of ethical concern with two different counterfeit products. The effects of ethical ideologies and collectivism on consumer complicity were observed to operate indirectly through hedonic shopping and ethical concern with using counterfeits.

The primary limitation is the use of a convenience sample of US college students and future research should take the scale items developed in this study and test in multiple country markets.

The paper extends previous research by examining several identified predictors of complicity with different products, across virtual and physical markets, and with multiple criteria incorporating both acquisition, intent to acquire, and willingness to share.

Counterfeiting is an increasing global problem, which affects a wide spectrum of industries – fashion, pharmaceutical, cosmetic, electronic, food processing etc. Globalisation, growth of the world commerce, new markets and technology development have contributed to the growth of the phenomenon of counterfeiting. Besides, counterfeiting has an unfavourable effect on legitimate manufacturers, consumers, as well as on national and international economy.

This chapter is aimed at presenting attitudes of consumers in Bosnia and Herzegovina toward counterfeit products. The intention was to examine whether and why consumers buy counterfeit products, which counterfeit products are purchased most frequently, consumers' attitudes toward counterfeit products and the degree of awareness of the risk of using counterfeit products.

Results of a research conducted on the sample of 427 respondents in Bosnia and Herzegovina reveal that 78.2% of them have bought a counterfeit product, while the most frequently purchased kinds of products include clothes and footwear. The results show that consumers typically buy counterfeit products over the internet or in the local marketplaces, and that the most frequent reasons for buying counterfeit products include lower prices, impossibility to buy the original product and the impossibility to recognise a counterfeit product. The research has also showed that most respondents agree that product counterfeiting affects both manufacturers and the national economy. It was also revealed that the respondents are aware of the risks that counterfeit products may cause.

This chapter examines the potential and limitations of criminal law as a policy tool for fighting against the trade in counterfeit goods in Tanzania. It uncovers major challenges involved in tackling the counterfeiting business in Tanzania using criminal law. The chapter shows that counterfeit goods have infiltrated many supply chains in Tanzania. Both law-related and non-law factors drive the counterfeit goods trade. The counterfeiting business affects consumers, traders, the economy and the general society in Tanzania. The counterfeiting business presents serious societal risks during the crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic owing to the possible infiltration of counterfeit pharmaceuticals into the medical supply chain. Criminal law is part of Tanzania's legal embodies for fighting against the counterfeit goods trade. Both law-related and non-law limitations and challenges undermine the efficacy of criminal law in tackling the trade in counterfeit goods in Tanzania. The chapter recommends policy, legal and institutional reforms that will help to augment the efficacy of the anti-counterfeiting legal regime in Tanzania.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of resilience enablers in combating counterfeits in the medicine supply chain based on a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). The objective is also to help practitioners and scholars as the review revealed that little research has been conducted on selecting and implementing practices to improve resilience to counterfeiting.

Based on the literature review, a content analysis was performed for 84 selected papers to explore the potential relationship among resilience enablers and counterfeit anti-measures.

This paper contributes to Supply Chain Resilience (SCR) research by summarizing the highly fragmented literature concerning how to combat counterfeiting. The SLR indicated reengineering, collaboration, visibility, innovation, SCR culture and trust as six key enablers to combat counterfeit medicines and identified literature gaps. Moreover, the paper discusses other resilience enablers which have been less studied in the literature and shows new avenues of research.

This paper is limited in that it is an exploratory literature review and focuses only on three databases over the past 15 years. Furthermore, counterfeit is a rapidly evolving issue and anti-measure studies require frequent surveillance concerning new discoveries.

The main contribution of this paper is to provide a better understanding of enablers most often associated with counterfeit anti-measures, which, therefore, might help to increase resilience to counterfeit medicines. Moreover, research gaps involving enablers less associated with anti-measures are presented.

The purpose of this paper is to identify strategies employed by product counterfeiters in their exploitation of legitimate supply chains; to develop a theoretical understanding of counterfeiting and its impact on competitive resources; and, to propose counter-measures for increasing the resilience of supply chains to the counterfeiting threat.

An inductive, qualitative analysis of secondary case data obtained from three sources.

Initial searching and coding identified four sets of strategies: extraction strategies, for obtaining products or materials from the legitimate economy; production strategies, for manufacturing counterfeit goods; distribution strategies; and, infiltration strategies, for introducing counterfeits into the legitimate economy. Secondary, focused coding revealed that much of what the counterfeiting strategies set out to achieve involves the generation, suppression or exploitation of signals. A theoretical account of counterfeiting and its impact on competitive resources (quality, reputation and trademark) is then developed based on signalling theory and the resource-based view.

A set of counter-measures for dealing with the counterfeiting threat are proposed. There is scope for much further work on counterfeit resilience, including on establishing the effectiveness of these counter-measures.

Counterfeiting is an increasingly significant supply chain problem. It provides a direct economic challenge to legitimate producers, undermines the value of trademarks and threatens consumer welfare. It affects many industries, including automotives, aerospace and pharmaceuticals, where counterfeits have sometimes proven fatal. The paper adds to the understanding of how this phenomenon takes place and how it might be tackled.

Although many OM studies refer to the risks of patent and copyright infringements that arise in supply chains, the problem of product counterfeiting has received only limited attention, leaving a clear gap in the understanding.

Increased outsourcing and importation of drugs from different parts of the world to the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region result in the proliferation of substandard and fake medicines, posing a threat to public health. The presence of substandard and fake medications in LAC regions is a source of public health concern and causes an economic burden to the governments in these regions. Whereas testing and detecting medication quality can easily be achieved in developed countries, the situation is different in developing countries such as LAC. This paper aims to examine the public health challenges faced by LAC regarding substandard, fake and counterfeit medicines and how the region can tackle these challenges.

Databases such as Scopus, PubMed, ScienceDirect, Embase, HINARI, EBSCOhost, Google Scholar, unpublished data, conference abstracts and papers from World Health Organization, Pan-American Health Organization and electronic newspapers were searched concerning medicine quality and in LAC.

Drug treatment improves the quality of life while decreasing morbidity and mortality among diseased populations. Absence of or inadequate testing laboratories, old and ineffective legislature, lack of enforcement or willpower and lack of effective surveillance are challenges in LAC for the proliferation of substandard and falsified medicines (SFMs).

The most significant limitation of this study was the need for the reviewers to have used articles written in other languages besides English. The LAC region has a large population in non-English-speaking countries, and many articles are written using local languages. Hence, excluding those articles is a limitation worthy of note in this review. The articles accessed needed to provide adequate information on SFM markets and illegal pharmacies or hospitals but did not. Future reviews may focus on providing illegal substandard and falsified medicines markets in the region and how they can be minimized or eliminated.

This review highlights the challenges faced by LAC countries regarding substandard, fake and counterfeit medicines. The sources, prevalence and consequences of substandard and falsified drugs were identified to suggest the measures needed to curb the infiltration of low-quality medicines in LAC.

This study develops and tests a model exploring the relationship between supply chain (SC) counterfeit risk management and performance in the healthcare supply chain (HCSC).

In the proposed theoretical model, HCSC counterfeit risk management is characterized by HCSC counterfeit risk orientation (HCRO), HCSC counterfeit risk mitigation (HCRM) and HCSC risk management integration (HRMI), while performance is represented by healthcare logistics performance (HLP) and healthcare organization overall performance (HOP). Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and survey data from 55 HCSC managers are used to test the research hypotheses.

HCRO has a significant positive effect on HCRM, while HCRM has a positive impact on HRMI. With respect to HLP, HCRM has a nonsignificant effect, while HRMI has a significant impact, thus confirming the important mediating role of HRMI. Finally, HLP has a significant positive effect on the overall performance of healthcare organizations.

All study participants were from the United States, limiting the generalizability of the study findings to different countries or regions. The sample size employed in the study did not allow the authors to distinguish among the different types of healthcare organizations.

This study delineates between a healthcare organization's philosophy toward counterfeiting risks vs actions taken to eliminate or reduce the impact of counterfeiting on the HCSC. By offering firm-level guidance for managers, this study informs healthcare organizations about addressing the challenge of counterfeiting in the HCSC.