Whether or not a term is generic has nothing to do with its legality. When
I was a kid any refrigerator was a frigidaire. Never once did we worry that
we'd get sued or go to prison for it. It's sort of a catch-22 for the
corporate world. Make you product ubiquitous enough, and it becomes common
usage. Every ad man's (and woman's) dream is to bash the product name so
deep in the public's psyche that that the first thing they think of when
they think of bleach or a refrigerator is their product. Get irritated at
Frigidaire or Clorox, not the public, they didn't set out to steal the
name. GM spent millions trying to make this happen and then cries when it
does. Boo hoo, I feel real sorry for them.
Speaking of GM, one of the biggest boo boo's in public relations history
was the roll out of Ford's Edsel. They hired the Glenn Miller Orchestra to
be there, Glenn was long dead of course. No one noticed until afterwards
that every musician was sitting behind a music stand with 2 foot high
letters blarring out "GM."
I got to make this short as I've got a lot of Xeroxing to do on my Canon
copier.
--Dick
At 10:13 AM 12/5/97 -0500, you wrote:
>In a message dated 97-11-22 13:13:40 EST, Dick Sullivan writes:
>
>>
>>That's why I said plain Clorox. Ain't that sort of like frigidaire, a
>>generic term now?
>
>I worked at Frigidaire for three months short of 30 years, and Frigidaire is
>NOT a generic word. It is a registered trade mark, first of General Motors
>(Frigidaire was a division of GM until 1979), and currently of White
>Consolidated, who bought it. All 25 thousand GM-Frigidaire, and the couple of
>thousand White-Frigidaire employees would scream if they thought people
>considered it as generic.
>
>"Hover" sweepers have been concerned about mis-use of their name as well,
>since in England, to vacuum your house is to hover it. And, of course, Xerox,
>Coke and Kleenex are other old names. When we make copies, we do make Xerox
>copies, as our xerographic copier is a Xerox brand.
>
>Not trying to flame, and I hope this doesn't start a long thread on trade
>names, but you hit a sore spot with me. Almost as bad as people saying "Look
>at the PITCHER" when they mean "Look at the picture." When I teach, I
have a
>picture of a pitcher that I immediatly bring out when that happens. Works
>pretty well, too.
>
> :-)
>
>Don
>
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