“I want people to think first and only of us when they think of a product”.
Sound familiar? I’m sure it does. Many entrepreneurs, after establishing profitability of their business, set their sights on establishing market dominance and becoming household names.
While the popularization of your product/service may at first glance appear good for your business, it puts its legal protection at risk.
Trademarks protect the name, sign, design, logo, etc., associated with your company or products, and prevent others from capitalizing on goodwill accrued to your names or logos to sell their products.
When a product name becomes so popular that the name is associated with other products in the same category, it loses its trademark. For instance, “Flip Phone” was originally a trademark of Motorola, but has subsequently lost legal protection as a trademark by becoming the common name of that type of phone as used both by the consuming public and commercial competitors.
When this happens, third parties can now have unrestricted use of the trademark, and this is a big deal! In fact, Adobe and Google are currently working to mitigate the synonymizing of Photoshop with image editing and Google with web searches to prevent this very phenomenon.
So you see, there’s a household name (known and used by everyone) and there’s a household name (so known and used by everyone, it’s not clear whose it is).
Avoid becoming the latter. Protect your trademark!