Tim Tse's Blog

I was flipping my marketing book earlier and discovered there’s a section related to copycat products. One may ask, what are copycat products? In my opinion, they are essentially company brand products that have similar (or even exact) physical appearance, and the names of these products are often similar to the real ones. These copycat products are usually found right next to the “real” products in order to confuse customers to purchase the fake one.

During a grocery shopping trip to a supermarket, I was shocked when I found a product called “Mum’s Cookies” sitting beside Kraft/Christie’s “Dad’s Cookies”. They had similar packaging, and the names of the products made me laugh for the whole day. “Mum’s Cookies”, the copycat product, was selling at a lower price than “Dad’s Cookies”. Not only cookies, popular necessities such as juice, shower gel, and even medicine pills are often “copied”. What bothers me the most is that, how come it’s legal to produce copycat products? The copyright law protects products such as books, music, movies from being copied directly. But why are companies not penalized for producing copycat products?

Taken from preseidentschoice.ca

Top: Copycat product; Bottom: Real product

Notice how similar their bottles look alike.

Taken from dealseekingmom.com

Looking from another point of view, is it ethical to manufacture copycat products? It seems like the producers of copycat products steal the appearance of the original product, but often with inferior content inside the packaging. My opinion is that, the government should interfere by enforcing laws to penalize companies that produce copycat products since it’s not ethical and clashes with the idea of the copyright law.