household names (that don't belong to your household)

You don't really see this tactic anymore in advertising--I can't even remember the last time I heard it in a commercial or read it in a printed advert--and there's a good reason for it. Up until maybe fifteen or twenty years ago, ads of all kinds would refer to the product in question as 'becoming a household name'. The obvious desire is for the product to become such a fixture for everybody that it becomes a part of everyone's household--everybody's life. And even though it's great to have a popular product on the market, around the last half of the twentieth century the manufacturers and owners of certain brands discovered that 'becoming a household name' wasn't all it was cracked up to be.


Turns out that when a particular product becomes so commonplace and such a fixture in everyday life, it becomes the generic term for anything from any brand. This doesn't sound so bad, but when that happens the brand name actually loses its protection as a trademark. You know how in most movies, TV shows, books, and other media all the immediately recognizable products are referred to under a different name (often deliberately derivative of the real one it's meant to parallel--like, for example, Bill Amend of 'Foxtrot' fame frequently referred to a popular chain of coffee shops as 'Coffeebucks')? It might seem like a little silly joke but the reason they do this is because to mention or show a real product from a real brand with a trademark name still protected under the law costs money.

A brand that becomes generic--widely and universally used to denote any similar kind of product--can legally lose its standing as a brand name and its trademark is no longer valid. You find something close to this in parts of the US, such as the Midwest, where people refer to sodas or carbonated beverages of any kind as 'Coke', even though Coke is a brand name and most people don't use it that way. It also exists in Britain, as well, where the brand name 'Hoover' has become not only the generic term for a vacuum cleaner of any kind but also to the act of vacuuming itself--'hoovering'--and even sometimes used to describe other actions that bring to mind a strong suctioning action, such as saying somebody who eats very quickly as 'hoovering their food'.

So becoming a household name isn't actually that good of a result in the long run for a particular brand name. Thermos, Vaseline, and Escalator were brand names for 'insulated beverage container', 'petroleum jelly', and 'electrical moving staircase' but lost their trademark protection. Jello is threatened as a brand name and may also lose its protection as the generic 'gelatin dessert'.

Which is why nobody talks about being a household name anymore. It can kind of screw you.