Depending where you get your products, it will be important to prevent other parties from copying your products. Prevention will depend on a few factors including the difficulty to create the product and protection to keep your product secret.
PRODUCT TYPE
It is always important to prevent counterfeit products. There are some products that may be hard to prevent counterfeits even with prevention techniques.
If you have invented a new product, one thing to think about is how easy the product can be reversed engineered.
In the cases of food products, it may be hard to reverse engineer an exact recipe. A consumer can only taste the product and guess the ingredients, but it will be hard to guess the exact ingredients and the amount in the product.
In the case of physical products, it may depend on the technical components. If the product is purely mechanical, a consumer can easily take it apart and rebuild the product. If the product has both a mechanical portion and a software portion, it may be easier to prevent counterfeiting.
PREVENTION
The first step of prevention is by protecting secrets. This can be done by limiting the amount of people who have information, locking information in a safe and secured place, and having others enter into non-disclosure agreements. These types of prevention actions are one that be controlled by the owner.
In some cases, it will be out of the hands of the owner. This usually happens when the owner outsources the manufacturing of the product and the manufacture leaks the secret. Even after entering into a non-disclosure agreement, once a secret is out, it will be hard to control the spread.
If this is a potential issue with the product, an owner should not put all their eggs in one basket. That is, if the product can be separated in a certain way, the product parts and be sent for manufacturing separately and constructed in a different place.
For software products, the software may be the most important part. The mechanical features can be sent to one manufacture, but the software should be kept in-house.