News

SECURITY PROBLEM

di Dario Casiraghi - Insight - Anno 2003

This is the question: is it fair to give the final customer the illusion of feeling safe and protected with the only purpose of selling more and more easily? The ERSI association (Esperti Riferme Serrature Italia) has decided to get to the core of the matter. This time "the case" concerns the European profile security cylinders. Or better the management of the information about these products. They landed in Italy only some years ago. Since then, their marketing has been recording a constant decrease in spite of immediate success they met, when they were launched onto the market. But, then, they were a novelty. The fact is that retailers and consumers still know little or nothing about these products. Recently, a group specialized manufacturing locks has raised an important question: some firms give retailers and consumers vague information on cylinder locks. So ERSI, their trade union, promoted an interesting initiative aimed at making the general situation clearer Concerning this Maurizio Benini, Vice President of ERSI tells us how things have gone:

"We realized that the consumer was frequently given misleading information on the subject of the duplication of the keys. One cannot say that a product is patented or that it is a non-duplicable key when, as a matter of fact, it isn’t. Admittedly, it is a very complex and hardly extricable issue. Just think, for instance, that Germany does not grant the patent on products that Italy “are regularly patented, and vice versa. For this reason the firms should pledge themselves to give information as clear as possible to the public. First of all, firms shouldn’t guarantee products that are neither patented nor non-duplicable: the problem is that some firms turned to their own advantage the consumers’ ignorance of this subject. Along with the locks they gave a card that, as they said, was necessary for the key duplication when, in reality, those keys were not patented and, what’s more, not only was their intermediate forging marketed freely but also easily available. In short the protection guaranteed by that card was worth less then waste paper. To give the consumer the illusion of a total protection, even offering poor-quality products, evidently was judged an astute stratagem to increase sales and prices. After an in-depth analysis on the subject, ERSI immediately decided to take a firm stand on property cards” and to urge a meeting to definitely clarify the matter with the firms. The proposal of the meeting was forwarded last autumn but, so far we have received an explicit, affirmative answer from no more than three or four firms. The other firms. about thirty, held that the problem was not on top of a priority scale, true or not. It is undoubtedly a thorny problem, and few firms dare to question themselves on the matter frankly and in all honesty. But the ERSI partners have become conscious that they have to make their experience professionalism felt if they want to protect the consumer and accordingly the role of specialized distribution and of the market in general. No matter if this means making themselves disliked. ERSI is determined to continue its informative campaign regardless of possible obstructive tactics that some firms might embrace. Moreover, the latter seems too busy to give decisive, concrete answers although they have been repeatedly mixed up over the past months."