Marketing Compliance as a Tool for Combating Product Counterfeiting in the Consumer Market of Ukraine

Abstract

The article substantiates the conceptual foundations of marketing compliance as an independent subsystem of conformity management, the subject of which is the reliability of product information, the conformity of a product to its declared characteristics, and the integrity of advertising claims. Marketing compliance is distinguished from corporate and financial compliance by the criterion of the control object, and it is demonstrated that it covers a specific class of risks related to consumer deception not addressed by adjacent conformity frameworks. The typology of product falsification (assortment-based, quality-based, quantitative, informational, and cost-based) is systematized, and the scale of the phenomenon on the Ukrainian consumer market is analyzed, particularly in the dairy sector, where the share of falsified products reaches 20–25% according to expert estimates of the Union of Dairy Enterprises of Ukraine. The role of commodity expertise in the compliance control chain is revealed, and the hierarchy of identification methods for falsified products – from organoleptic to molecular (DNA markers, spectroscopy, mass spectrometry) – is characterized. The regulatory framework for combating falsification is analyzed, including the Law of Ukraine "On Consumer Rights Protection" No. 3153-IX, the Law "On State Market Surveillance and Control of Non-Food Products," as well as European acts – Regulation (EU) 2019/1020, the Safety Gate rapid alert system, and RASFF. The mechanism of embedding compliance filters into the marketing product policy of an enterprise at the stages of procurement, assortment formation, labeling, and control of advertising claims in the digital environment is substantiated. The foreign experience of market surveillance in Poland and Lithuania as a benchmark for the Ukrainian model is examined, and prospects for compliance digitalization through blockchain traceability and QR-verification of product origin are outlined.