One Product Identity, Many Tagging Technologies — Here’s Why…
Today, consumers expect end to end traceability, authenticity and engaging experiences from consumer product brands — from packaged goods to apparel items to pharmaceuticals. How do consumer brands deliver on these expectations? Not only deliver on expectations, but manage them throughout a product’s life cycle?
Over the past year product digitization has become the norm rather than the exception. Increasingly brands are turning to digital identities to track and trace products through the supply chain. Where it gets complicated — and what you will learn in this blog — is in the number of different tagging options brands now have when digitizing products. Choosing the right one can be overwhelming.
Let me guide you through the range of tagging technologies and their applications so you can make the right choice for your business and your customers.
Why Product Digitization?
Brands need end-to-end visibility and transparency across sourcing, production & distribution to run operations with agility, resilience, and control. The digitization of product items provides for the collection and integration of granular data across each stage of the supply chain. Data can be organized in the EVRYTHNG Product Cloud™ for application with real-time analytics & intelligence. The result is more responsiveness to changes in sales channels and customer needs, shorter turn-arounds between design and delivery, optimized transportation, and routing production to where materials may be.
The key to achieving end-to-end visibility and transparency is the ability to interoperate with myriad partners and technologies across the supply chain. At a strategic level, this means choosing the right digitization and tagging technologies to allow collaboration throughout a product’s lifecycle journey.
Historically, the aggregation and sharing of data hasn’t been quick, easy or cost-effective — especially at scale. By turning each product item into a data generating asset with a digital identity, brands can disrupt the status quo and lead with business strategies influenced by real-time data intelligence.
Now that we’ve clarified the need for product digitization let’s jump to the more complex discussions of: 1. the format of these product identities and 2. the types of tags that should hold them.
Choosing the format of your digital product identities
While the world’s original tag, the good old one-dimensional (GS1) barcode did the job for more than 45 years, it is no longer relevant in a mobile-first global economy. With eCommerce growing at an unprecedented rate, digitized products provide a mechanism for brand owners to scale dynamic direct-to-consumer engagements across a complex set of product lines, brands, markets and channels. A critical enabler in this dynamic is GS1 Digital Link which upgrades the ubiquitous one-dimensional barcode so that every product item can now be smartphone-interactive, transact with point-of-sale systems and connect on the web — all with one digitized code on the product.
Essentially this standard provides a structured web address (aka URL) for each and every product, one that’s compatible with the already very wide spread GS1 identification system. The difference being that a Digital Link is fully integrated with the Web, unlike traditional GS1 identifiers like the well recognized GTIN (product identifier) that appear in 1 dimensional barcodes.
As an example, the following URL is a compliant GS1 Digital Link: https://dfnnr.tn.gg/01/860080001300/21/445
This Digital Link contains both a GTIN (Global Trade Item Number — 860080001300) and a serial number (445).
Choosing the right type of tag to host a digital identity
Which physical tag, sometimes referred to as a data carrier, is best for your brand to use to carry its digital product identities? As hinted before, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to this question. All tags have pros and cons and the following infographics summarizes the highlights and lowlights at a high level.
As a general rule we believe that the future of product identities should be tag agnostic. This is an important criteria when choosing your digital identity or cloud provider. In other words, you do not want the destiny of your product digital identities to be locked in one particular type of tag.
Tag agnosticity is a part of my company’s DNA. We partner with the industry’s leading and most innovative tag technology providers supporting every type of tag, ranging from QR and Data Matrix codes to digital watermarks (e.g., Digimarc) to NFC tags (e.g., NXP or EM tags) to RAIN RFID tags to Bluetooth Low Energy labels (e.g., Wiliot), and even LPWAN — Low Power Wide Area Network Tags (e.g., Sigfox and LoRa, The Things Network). As a result, we’re able to work with consumer brands to create product digitization strategies that meet their unique needs. We’re even helping brands apply multiple tag types to a single product as an added layer of brand protection.
To further help you navigate the subtle differences, we’ve created a summary table ranking different tagging technologies based on their accessibility, security, breath of use cases and cost efficiency.
On top of partnering with a tag agnostic product identity provider, there is a simple technical detail to ensure your tag strategy outlives the current hype: can the selected tag support Web identities such as the GS1 Digital Link. Ideally it should directly support URLs or, at the very least, support a simple way to convert to a URL. This is especially important when considering consumer experiences. Using URLs ensures a seamless interaction between brands and consumers while also opening the door to other important use cases.
Future-Proofed
If you are reading this blog because you want a clear and educated answer to how to select the best tagging technology, I’ll summarize with my top picks.
If I had to choose one future proof product identity format it would be the GS1 Digital Link. Not because I co-chaired the development of this standard, but because it adheres to the two primary criteria for the future-proofed digitization strategy:
- It is Web enabled creating a true bridge between the physical world and the Internet?
- It is based on an open standard and ensuring brands don’t get locked into a single technology provider?
If I had to choose a single tagging technology to store a digital identity today, it would be a serialized QR code. Serialized QR codes are:
- accessible and universally recognized by consumers worldwide (COVID clearly helped with raising awareness of QR codes),
- supported by all smartphones and supply chain readers, and
- relatively simple & inexpensive to deploy at scale.
All in all, connected packaging is evolving at an unprecedented rate and in the process disrupting the way brands and consumers interact. Product identities are converging to the Web, tag prices are coming down for instance with — RAIN RFID tags reaching and NFC tags approaching — the symbolic 1$ cent mark but also with printed electronics making it possible for labels and tags to sense their environment and harvest energy (check out Wiliot). Hence, there will probably never be one tag to rule them all and flexibility will be key. The future of consumer brands in the digital world will require a tag agnostic strategy with convergence happening at the product identity layer.
I’d welcome the opportunity to talk to you about your business’ unique product digitization needs. Please feel free to message me or contact us here.
EVRYTHNG helps the world’s consumer brands run their business differently™ — with agility, resilience and efficiency — by applying data intelligence and real-time learning from the billions of data points each product generates through its supply chain journey from sourcing to the factory to retail to the consumer to recycle or recommerce.
Dr. Dominique Guinard is CTO and co-founder of EVRYTHNG, the Product Cloud providing digital identities for the world’s consumer products. An IoT expert, Dom is currently a co-chair of the GS1 Digital Link working group, leading the EPCIS 2.0 Standard Web API work, an advisor and contributor to the World Economic Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Blockchain for Supply Chain project, and faculty member at the Blockchain Research Institute.
