14 DAY TRIAL // The Apple “iPad” name may soon become synonymous with tablet computer, according to linguistics experts, IP attorneys and other names in the tech industry that have seen this happen dozens of times with other products and services.
"For the vast majority, the idea of a tablet is really captured by the idea of an iPad,'" says Josh Davis, a manager at Abt Electronics in Chicago. "They gave birth to the whole category and brought it to life."
A company will want its brand name to become popular enough that everyone will soon refer to the name as the product type.
"There's nothing that can be done to prevent it once it starts happening," says Michael Weiss, professor of linguistics at Cornell University. "There's no controlling the growth of language."
However, the same trend can have negative effects, ultimately. A brand name can become so common that a judge could rule that it’s too “generic” to be trademarked.
One company that has run through such troubles is Kimberly-Clark, which owns the Kleenex brand.
The Huffington Post reports that Kleenex uses "Kleenex brand" instead of just "Kleenex" on its packaging and in marketing materials. This serves to remind people that Kleenex is trademarked. The company even contacts the people who use Kleenex generically to refer to tissues in order to correct them.
"We've worked very hard to keep `Kleenex' from going the route of `escalator' and `aspirin,'" says Vicki Margolis, vice president and chief counsel, intellectual property and global marketing for Kimberly-Clark. "If we lose the trademark, people can use it with sandpaper and call that a Kleenex."
Another such example is Xerox, which introduced the first automatic copier in 1959 and has since struggled to keep its brand from becoming generic, despite people using "Xerox" to refer to any copying machine nowadays.
Google is also a good point of reference. You’ll often find yourself saying “Google it” rather than “search for it on the web”.
Mary Schmidt, a 58 year-old marketing executive from Baltimore, regards the iPad name as synonymous with "tablet [PC]. Schmidt owns an Apple iPad and doesn’t know the names of any other tablet computers.
"When I think of tablets, I think of an iPad," she says. "I think it's going to be the generic name. They were first."
Allen Adamson, managing director at branding firm Landor, said “At the end of the day, the product was so successful that even if it wasn't the `quote unquote' best name, it made the name synonymous with the category.”