Why Your Product Identity Programme Will Fragment. And How To Stop It

Products are beginning to carry their own identity. A bottle of cognac, a luxury handbag, a pair of skis — each can now be recognised individually and connected to a secure digital record as it moves from production to sale, service and resale. Technologies like QR codes, NFC chips and RFID tags are how you access that identity. They are not the identity itself.

This distinction matters more than most programmes currently reflect.

The shift is creating real operational value for the brands that are structured to capture it: earlier detection of grey market diversion, more precise inventory allocation, verifiable authenticity at every lifecycle stage, and the ability to recognise a product, and its owner, when it returns for repair or resale.

But the shift is also accelerating external pressure. Retailers are upgrading point-of-sale infrastructure to support 2D barcodes under GS1’s Sunrise 2027 programme. Regulatory frameworks are expanding serialisation and traceability requirements. Resale platforms are formalising authentication standards. The infrastructure is moving whether individual brands are ready or not.

“If you look at the first movers, none of them are moving for compliance. Compliance is really a lever for the laggards. The leaders are moving for data and ownership.”
— Camilla Young, Programme Lead — Next Generation of Barcodes, GS1 UK

The research identifies a pattern that appears across sectors and company sizes. A programme begins well. Compliance triggers the first initiative. A pilot demonstrates early success. Then, almost imperceptibly, fragmentation sets in.

The compliance system creates one identifier. Logistics introduces another for warehouse management. The marketing team launches a consumer-facing QR code that points to a third record. Each identifier was created for a legitimate reason. None of them were designed to connect.

Twelve months later, the organisation wants to build a resale programme, and discovers that the product history it needs is split across three systems, none of which were designed to talk to each other. The rebuild costs more than the original programme.

The research is direct about why this happens: ‘These are structural conditions. Once embedded, they are costly to unwind. Without defined ownership at enterprise level, lifecycle identity cannot be maintained at scale.’

The research identifies three structural choices that are made early, often before their significance is apparent, and that determine whether product identity becomes a unified foundation or a fragmentation problem.

1. Choose unified over siloed identity
2. Define identity independently of technology
3. Design pilots to test foundations, not marketing metrics

“Digitised products are not a channel or a tool. They are an operating model connector that links supply chain, commercial, marketing and data into one system.”
— Nicolas Comestaz, VP Global Data & AI CoE, Coty

When these structural decisions are made correctly the research shows that three operational capabilities become available in ways they otherwise cannot.

Availability improves because stock position moves from estimation to observation. Rather than inferring demand from aggregated sales reports, brands can see exactly which items are where, how fast they are moving, and where friction is appearing in real time. Decathlon’s near-100% stock accuracy, achieved through item-level RFID identity treated as shared operational data, is the clearest example in the research.

Control strengthens because diversion and abnormal movement become detectable signals rather than audit findings. In premium spirits, serialised bottle monitoring is already being used to identify geographic diversion before pricing erosion appears in reported sales. Intervention becomes possible while allocation and partner action can still change outcomes.

Trust scales because authenticity and entitlement travel with the product rather than depending on paperwork. Rimowa links each suitcase to a secure product identity accessible via NFC — warranty information, repair history and resale provenance are all verifiable from the product itself, not from documentation that can be lost or forged.

The conclusion of the research is precise on this point: unified product identity is not a technology pilot. It is a capital allocation and governance decision. The question is not which scanning technology to use. It is who owns product identity, who governs it, and whether every new initiative, from compliance to resale to AI, builds on the same item-level record.

The brands that are getting this right are not necessarily the largest or the most digitally advanced. They are the ones that made the structural decision early, before fragmentation had time to embed itself.

The ones that delayed are now paying to rebuild.