Brand name dominance

The ultimate level is brand name dominance where, in a recall task, most customers can only provide the name of a single brand such as Coca-Cola, Steak Sauce, Kleenex, Xerox and many more. This shows that dominance of the brands on the peoples’ mind. This is usually referred as a successful brand positioning and promotion as the value of the company also increases together with the value of the brand name.

However, ironically this ultimate success may be tragic if the brand name becomes such a common label for the product that is not legally protectable and is lost. This happened in the cases of Aspirin, Cellophane, Escalator and Windsurfer.

In order to avoid losing the trademark, a firm should begin protecting it early in its life by starting with the selection of the name itself and beware of the descriptive names such as Windows as it becomes harder to distinguish from the generic product and hence harder to protect.

In the case of luxury brand fashion products, it does not seem to be a reason for concern as majority luxury brand fashion products already have their unique and patent protected names which are not also generic names which are hard to protect. However, they still have to be careful about making their products or brand names to be used to describe other similar products in the market as it creates confusion and damages the brand name and image.