Occasionally we encounter start-up technology clients who tell us they want their name to be so popular it gets turned into a verb. Like, Google or Xerox. Oh ho ho, no you don’t! These big-name companies spend a lot of money fighting the genericization of their famous brand names. They all want to protect themselves from their brand name becoming so generic that they lose their trademark rights.
Case in point. Kleenex recently took out this full page ad in Brandweek; surely not pocket change. (Keep reading after the image for more of the blog post.)
If you can’t quite read the text, it says:
You don’t need a Social Security number to get your identity stolen. When you spend nearly a century building a name that people know and trust, the last thing you want is people calling any old tissue a Kleenex® Tissue. Simply put, ‘Kleenex’ is a brand name and should always be followed by an ® and the word ‘Tissue.’ Please help us keep our identity, ours.
The upside of having your name used as the generic term, or as a “verb” is that you own top-of-mind presence with the consumer. The downside is that when your name becomes synonymous with the category name, any one of your competitors (or all of them!) can use it to describe their own similar product.
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In honor of Saint Patrick’s Day, Catchword’s naming leprechauns have been busy compiling statistics on Green names and implications for marketers.