Google doesn't like you googling

"You wipe your nose with kleenex, shave with gilette, dream of having a jeep..." that is how a short brand eponyms discussion on our Facebook fun page has started. But, at the end, it was everything but short, so we decided to write an article explaining problems that these brand eponyms cause to their owners.

Trademark is something you usually notice as a little TM mark beside the brand logotype, but it is so much more than just a mark. It stands for all the elements that define and separate that certain product from the similar products on the market. For example, logotype, brand name and slogans are all part of the trademark.

Every trademark launched to the market gets certain rights and these rights must be carefuly maintained and renewed every couple of years depending on the country trademark rules and regulation. Trademarks, unlike other forms such as copyrights and patents, must be actively used and defended. While patents are easier to protect, trademarks must cope with everyday changes on the market. Looking throughout brand history, trademark rights were usually lost due to the disappearing of the sole products and services from the market, but today the situation is a bit different.

Today's biggest threat is called trademark generification - it reffers to trademarks that lost their rights due to the improper usage of the brand name. Genericised trademark is therefore a trademark whose name is not used to exclusively identify product or service of a particular business, but is widely associated and used for a whole range of similar products or services. Examples are Xerox (photocopy machine), Kleenex (tissues), Aspirin (painkiller) and many others. Trademarks become genericised through a process which is widely known as a trademark dillution, and it does not happen over night. It has certain stages, and can be prevented. So, allthough you might think that constant usage of a trademark name is good for advertising, it can cause lots of problems to trademark owners.

What is so wrong with generification?

Basicly, the problem is that when trademark dillution occurs, trademark owner looses absolutely every right on it. In that case company is no longer owner of the name, and therefore can not control its usage and guarantee for the quality of some new products that are now associated with that name. Also, when the name is associated with a certain product or a group of products, the original trademark owner company can not extend its business and develop some new products under this name anymore. With the fact that genericised trademark can be used by absolutely everyone, including the competition it is not hard to assume that through some negative advertising the original brand might dissappear from the market.

Eve with constant rise of "brand population" on the market, the situation with trademarks preservance is not improved. Even worse, it is getting harder and harder for the brand owners to keep their brand safe. New technologies and their wide usage have become a huge threat to trademarks. When on-line, informantions are getting decentralised, so the possible sources for wrong brand usage grow exponentially – and that could mean the end for the trademark. Some newer examples of young companies that went through this problems are Google, UGGS and TiVo.
Google was one of the first that got the public attention when the company's lawyers sent out warning letters and e-mails to those who inappropriately used the name "to google" as a synonim for "search". Everyone was quite stunned with such a harsh reaction from a liberal oriented company like Google. Still, Google kept on fighting for its name. Nevertheless, the battle was lead in a specific Google manner. As examples of a pproper and inapproper brand name usage you could find some interesting sentences like:

Inappropriate: He googles himself.
Appropriate: He ego-surfs on the Google search engine to see if he's listed in the results.

Inappropriate: I googled that hottie.
Appropriate: I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party.

Conlusion

Croatia has a small market, and therefore we are lucky that trademark dilution is not a big threat to our brands – yet. Still it is good to know that the popularity of the brand isn't always a good thing. This articles' aim was simply to remind everyone involved in trademarks whether owning or planing to own one, of the trademark name importance and the problems its generification might cause. Who knows, maybe next time you will think before you use certain brand name as a platform for creating new, trendy words like "skyping", "twitting", "googling". And maybe, just maybe, you might write the brand name with a capital letter. :)

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