What do you say to your friend when the college officials ask for another copy of some certificate, for reasons best known to them? Well apart from a few choice abuses, you ask your friend to quickly go and xerox that certificate at the nearest shop while you wait in the office.
When you go to the mall with no particular purpose, what better way to waste time than walking up and down escalators? When you see an interesting display that you wish to know more about, you whip out your cell phone and google it.
When you fall down and hurt yourself, you usually apply a band-aid on top the bruised area. When the winters give you flaky or rough skin, you apply vaseline on it to smoothen it out?
Why am I emboldening these select words, you might ask? What most of us don’t realize when we use these words in the generic sense, are that these are actually companies and brands. Xerox is just a company that manufactures photocopying machines. Yup, that’s what it’s actually called. So does Canon, and a bunch of other companies. But you never ask your friend to Canon your certificate do you?
I wonder what a Xerox executive might say to that.
An escalator was originally a trademark of the Otis Elevator Company, for their invention of the moving staircase.Band-aid is in fact the name of Johnson & Johnson’s line of adhesive bandages. Vaseline is the name of Unilever’s line of petroleum jelly. Google is, well you all know what Google is.
Okay no more bold words, I promise. However as you can see, for so long now we have been interchanging brand names with generic ones. These are generic trademarks. Sounding something like an oxymoron, it is a trademark or a brand name that has become synonymous with a class of product or service. There are plenty of other examples, such as Bayer’s Aspirin and Heroin (yes, that used to be a brand at one point), the Phillips-head screw which obviously is named after a Mr Phillips (Henry F. in this case) among many others. While it has certain inherent advantages, most companies don’t prefer their brands to be in this situation. Let us see why.
A trademark or a brand ceases to lose its distinction and starts becoming generic when it has achieved market dominance and has captured the customer’s mind space. After a brand has become successful enough, the customer starts to associate the brand with the commodity. So the fact that your brand name is a generic trademark means you did a few things right. Congratulations. So why aren’t these above mentioned companies tapping their heels and ‘singin’ in the rain’, so to speak? It’s because too much of something can sometimes be bad.
Your brand becoming a substitute for a generic commodity does not translate to higher sales; quite the opposite in fact. Let me illustrate with an example. Hansaplast is also a company that manufactures adhesive bandages. They too call their product band-aid, because most people would wonder what adhesive bandage means. When you go to the chemist and ask for a band-aid, there’s no saying whether he’ll give you the Johnson & Johnson’s one, the Hansaplant one or perhaps the Savlon one. Technically speaking, when you ask for a band-aid you should get a Johnson’s product. But you probably won’t.
Hansaplast with its packaging being suspiciously similar to Johnson & Johnson’s.
So you see what’s happening? When a brand becomes too popular and enters the domain of the generic, the company starts to lose control over its intellectual property rights. Competitors can now use your brand name as a generic word to describe their similar products and eat into your market share. Therefor companies must guard against this happening. While they naturally love to maintain a healthy market share, companies consciously try to prevent their brands from becoming generic trademarks.
Some of the companies that successfully brought their brands back from the brink are Nintendo with their game consoles, Microsoft with Windows and Lego with their toys that used to be called ‘legos’. Adobe too is trying to clamp down on the usage of their Photoshop brand to be used to describe the process of alteration of photographs, but with mixed success.
Here in India, Bisleri is one such brand that apparently has become a generic trademark, although I have not heard too many people ask for a ‘bisleri’ at hotels or cafes. Another brand that has most definitely become generic in India is Cadbury. It is quite freely used to describe chocolates of any kind and make. The same is valid to a certain extent for Pepsi. Aerated drinks are called ‘pepsi cola’ quite often, brand regardless.
As you can see, sometimes there are unexpected fallouts of the success of your brand. A company must be constantly vigilant regarding the situation of its brand, and make corrections whenever necessary.
So there’s my little take on generic trademarks. Let me know what you think of it, as feedback always helps. Hope it was illuminating.
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