Q: In your book ‘The Fake Factor’, you explore why people are attracted to buying fake products and highlight how people’s attitudes change when they are on holiday, for example. How much impact do you think tourism is having on the problem?

A couple of decades ago people could only buy fakes if they went abroad for them. Part of the fun of visiting Hong Kong was coming back with a fake luxury watch that you’d got by going to a secret backstreet shop with a man who whispered at you in the street as you explored the market stalls. You’d fool your friends, then explain how you could tell the difference, adding a bit of insider knowledge to your illicit purchase. It was about being daring and exotic and had a bit of James Bond glamour to it. You could get your fake Louis Vuitton canvas bags in Morocco, where they were for sale so openly and legitimately that you’d be keen to convince yourself that they weren’t really counterfeit; they were made at the same factory from the bits left over.

Now you’ve got Canal Street in New York where you see counterfeit watches, t-shirts and baseball caps openly on sale, but you still have to go to the little back rooms for the copies of French bags. I saw one seller with a wheelbarrow-based stall setting up right outside Bloomingdales. The bags on show are the ones that are copies which just manage to escape IP law - even though it’s plain to see that they are direct rip-offs – but the sellers are keen to get the real counterfeits (if you see what I mean) out of their black bin bags. There are football shirts for sale on Venetian market stalls, right outside the Doge’s Palace, and although the bag sellers are there, you’ve also got signs up in several different languages telling tourists that if they buy one, they’ll be arrested.

Going to a tourist spot and buying a counterfeit has become one of those things you do on holiday, like bungee jumping in New Zealand, making sandcastles on the beach or going to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

When people are on holiday, they are prepared to do things that are out of their normal comfort zone. At home, they probably wouldn’t buy stuff from street-sellers and their bin-bags or follow a complete stranger down a back alley. It’s another of those mistakes people make like buying shirts that look great at a beach bar or bottles of local brews that taste good while watching the sunset on a warm veranda.

Partly, it’s being away from the group of people you usually hang around with; there, you’re guided by your group influencers and when you’re away from those people you can lose your usual frame of reference.

Q: In this global market place, with the Internet now becoming a key purchasing tool, what do you see are the main challenges for a brand owner in educating the consumer about the value of its brand and the importance of purchasing genuine products?

The whole point of branding a product is to show that it is going to be as reliable as all the other things that company produces. Over the last couple of decades brands have moved away from advertising their goods and services on the basis of value, quality and reliability as that’s all been a bit old fashioned. Instead they have moved towards engaging people emotionally and portraying the lifestyle that goes with the brands instead. It’s worked really well as a way to increase sales and brand value, but it has created a longing for the lifestyle and its trappings, instead of the goods themselves.

It’s the genuine product that gives you the real value. The fake just gives you the look, and the short-lived feeling that you belong to a little club that knows what’s cool in the world of celeb magazines.

Q: You work closely with Lush, the producer of natural handmade cosmetic products. In your book you cite how Lush Times, the company’s customer newsletter, was imitated. How can companies protect against brand erosion ‘from all sides’ like this – where not just the product, but also the media and even the look, feel and experience of a brand is copied?

Lush was copied in its early days, although a lot of the imitators have given up. The ones who stay in business either make very inferior products, or charge more for them! The thing about Lush is that the products really are very well made (by hand), good value and produced with truly beautiful natural ingredients. It’s very difficult to copy that and make a decent profit – and certainly not the kind of profit that counterfeiters generally expect. In Italy we did have an imitator who copied the whole of the Lush Times, our catalogue, including scanning in our own photographs, copying the products and using our text. We sued, naturally enough, because this was absolutely outrageous. We lost all the arguments except that our copier was told to take his own photographs. The Italian court decided that it would be wrong to penalise a small local company that was providing work for the local community. Lush was set up by a bunch of former hippies who believe in karma, that the results of your actions will reflect on your life, and decided to wait for the company to go under by itself. If you defend your brand in court and are let down by the law, you just have to keep using your own creativity and ingenuity to stay ahead of the fakers.

Q: Many people will be surprised that shampoo, soap and other household goods are extensively copied, often being aware of only fake designer goods and pirated software, for example. In your research, what were the most surprising examples of counterfeits that you discovered?

I think that the fake toothpaste, branded “Crust” and brought home by a friend from a market in Libya, has been my biggest surprise so far. I’m still expecting more though. Everything that is branded is faked somewhere. The funniest one was in the Marrakech soukh where I saw traditional Moroccan pointed slippers made up with Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior style logos on them. The sellers were joking about it as they sold them, not really expecting anyone to believe they were real, but happy to take advantage and go along with anyone who wanted to be convinced.

Q: In the past, you have been quite outspoken about the high-end brands also being partially to blame for the prevalence of fake products – can you elaborate on some of these factors? [I was thinking in particular about your comment of luxury brands being advertised to the masses when they are clearly unaffordable to them]

I don’t think that luxury brands are to be blamed completely, but I do think that counterfeits arise as a natural consequence of the demand for expensive goods amongst people who can’t afford them. The brand owners have to claim some of the responsibility because they’ve helped to create this demand. If they ignore it, then they really can’t confront it. It’s not going to go away unless they get involved in reducing the demand for counterfeits of their own products. It’s nothing new. Counterfeiting has been going on since Ancient Roman times, since traders first started putting their mark on their products.

Brand owners have been concentrating on their outrage at their intellectual property rights being infringed. Most people who buy counterfeits don’t give two hoots about some posh bloke and his IP rights. In fact, some people told me that they think the luxury brands deserve to be copied because it’s evil to charge someone thousands of pounds, dollars or euros for a handbag and equally stupid to spend that much.

I’d say that the woman-in-the-street’s sympathy is not with the owners of luxury brands and this is something that they have to work on.

I feel that we need a move forward to concentrating on the genuine virtues of the product and service, and I think that the brands that will suffer in these tricky economic times are the ones that have gone for style over content in their publicity. For example, people used to buy one expensive suitcase to last them a lifetime, not one fashion season, and replace it if it wore out. If you are promoting your suitcase because of its structure, the qualities of the workmanship and the long terms value you get from it, then it’s less likely that anyone would want a cheap version. If a brand owner chooses to focus on the lifestyle values, rather than the inherent features and benefits, by promoting its new look and sending out PR shots of pop stars at airports, then you’ll encourage a desire amongst people who can’t afford it and will be happy to buy a fake that falls to bits on its first journey. They they’ll by the next new look as soon as that is counterfeited too.

My suggestion would be to go with the “handmade by skilled craftspeople” route if you want to create a luxury brand that survives the current recession.

Q: Finally, are you planning to write a sequel? If so, do you think your research would find the situation improving or worsening, and are there particular sectors or territories that the consumer needs to be particularly wary of?

I’m not sure about a sequel. My intention at the moment is to write a book about kindness. Researching the reasons why people buy both brands and fakes took me along a route which explored people’s reasons for their behaviour and what they hope to achieve by acting in a certain way. The recent books on happiness and “happynomics” interest me a great deal; they investigate the mythology around the great American Dream and most of Europe’s resistance to it: that working very hard in order to buy more and more stuff will make you happy. We’ve actually not got any happier since the 1970s. That’s what interests me at the moment. However, I’m writing and speaking about the counterfeit business a lot in the press and at conferences, so I’m still looking at the subject.

I looked mostly at why people buy fakes on purpose and I think I’d move into the area of where people are doing it by accident. That’s much more worrying. I was in the Far East recently and had my sun protection creams and my anti-mosquito spray confiscated by a supercilious idiot at an airport. I realised that I had absolutely no idea if the stuff I bought to replace it when I arrived would actually protect me against the sun or the insects. We’re going to have to rely more and more on the supply chains of our retailers. Even then, in the UK some pharmacists have been found selling counterfeit – useless - prescription medicines.

The big market to watch is Japan. They are crazy about their brands. They ask which brands you like in order to decide what kind of person you are. Louis Vuitton is massive there. However, they have huge chains of second hand shops that deal in nearly new, almost perfect designer branded accessories; if the counterfeiters get a hold supplying to these shops, then they will make a killing. If I were a counterfeiter that’s what I’d do, and if I were a luxury brand owner I’d keep a very watchful eye on those places.