That’s where the real question begins. How did these brands win the cultural lottery? What makes Kleenex a default, while other facial tissue brands remain just facial tissue? How did Bubble Wrap achieve immortality when competitors still sit in the corner labeled “protective cushioning” like a kid picked last for dodgeball?
I know a guy named Glen. He is not a friend nor is he an enemy; he’s just Glen. Glen’s not a bad person; he’s just annoying beyond belief. One of the annoying things Glen does, apart from having every food item on a separate plate when he goes out to dinner, is his propensity for telling you facts. He loves his facts, and even if you’re not the slightest bit interested in said facts, Glen will gleefully share them with you. And he does so in an annoying manner.
For example, if you’re going to sneeze and you ask for a Kleenex, he will refuse to give you one, saying, “Sorry, I don’t have a Kleenex. I have a fresh box of facial tissues; however, I do not have any of Kimberly-Clark’s Kleenex.” And he will smile and be pleased with himself because he has taught you something. And the something is that the brand name Kleenex is not the actual product name. The product name is facial tissue, not Kleenex. Now, does this really matter when a gob of snot is plopping out of your right nostril, and you need to scoop it up before it hits the floor with a moist thuck? Not to any normal human being, but to Glen, it is the highlight of his day. When he can “teach” someone something, impart some bit of utterly useless knowledge, then Glen is in his glory.
I recently had a Glen encounter where I made a comment about just wanting to sit in my apartment all day and pop bubble wrap. To which Glen replied, “I think what you mean is you want to sit around your apartment all day and pop package cushioning. Because that’s the real name of it; Bubble Wrap is a product name developed by the Sealed Air Corp.” And then he smiled his “I know this, and you don’t, but you really should,” smile.
In some ways, he’s like the character Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory, except that with Sheldon, there is a TV screen between you and his annoyingness. And Sheldon is a character beautifully brought to life by actor Jim Parsons. Glen is real, and he is far too often in your face. Also, he’s nowhere near as smart as Sheldon.
Despite his annoying behavior, Glen did make me think. He’s right. Kleenex is a brand name, as is Bubble Wrap, Jacuzzi, and ChapStick. All of these and many more are brand names that have become synonymous with the product. Now, I have often made the mistake of saying eponymous instead of synonymous, but as Glen once pointed out in a long, long boring impromptu TED Talk in the kitchen of a mutual friend one evening, eponymous means giving your name to something, such as sandwich, which came from the Earl of Sandwich. Or boycott, which was given to us by Charles Boycott. So, the right word, thank you, Glen, is synonymous.
But how does this happen? How does a humble brand become so connected to a product that the product becomes the name? How did Internet search become Google? How did permanent markers become Sharpie? And how did vacuum flasks become Thermos?
What does it take for a brand name to make that leap and become the synonymous moniker for a product, and is there anything a brand can do to achieve this?
Glen isn’t rare, by the way. There’s a Glen in nearly every friend group, every office, every extended family gathering where someone shows up with a folding chair and unsolicited trivia about the folding mechanism’s inventor. Glen is part of a whole subspecies of human beings whose purpose on Earth seems to be clarifying things that didn’t need clarification. The tragedy is they’re usually not malicious. In their minds, they’re doing a service. They’re helping. They’re making the world a more factually accurate place, one hijacked sneeze request at a time.
And the thing about Glen is that the moment he corrects you on something, he acts like he’s introduced you to a deep philosophical truth. You ask for a Kleenex because a Kleenex is the universal shorthand for something soft and absorbent to stop nasal disaster. Glen sees this as an intellectual emergency. In his world, using a brand name casually is a slippery slope toward societal collapse. Someone must intervene. Someone must protect the integrity of facial tissue nomenclature. And that someone is Glen.
But once the irritation from the correction fades, there’s a strange aftertaste of curiosity. You start noticing how often we substitute brand names for products. You realize Glen isn’t pointing out rare trivia. He’s pointing out something we all participate in without thinking. These brands have become so embedded in our language that we treat them like everyday nouns, the same way we’d talk about chairs and shoes and forks.
That’s where the real question begins. How did these brands win the cultural lottery? What makes Kleenex a default, while other facial tissue brands remain just facial tissue? How did Bubble Wrap achieve immortality when competitors still sit in the corner labeled “protective cushioning” like a kid picked last for dodgeball? And why do only a tiny handful of brands ever make that leap from trademark to vocabulary?
These are the questions Glen accidentally unlocked. His delivery was annoying, sure, but the idea underneath it is actually fascinating. Because whether Glen intended to or not, he brought us to the front door of a much bigger conversation about branding, culture, and the strange way language evolves around the things we use.
When Facts Attack
There’s a moment, right before Glen jumps in with one of his corrections, when you can almost feel it coming. You’ll be saying something completely ordinary, something any sane person would let pass without commentary, and Glen will lean in like he’s about to stop you from making a life-altering mistake. You ask for a Kleenex because, of course, you do. That’s what people ask for. And Glen treats it like a teachable moment he can’t let slip by.
And here’s the strange thing. Even though you want to tell him to move aside because gravity and mucus are having an urgent meeting under your nose, a part of your brain stays stuck on the correction itself. Kleenex really is a brand name. It isn’t the actual name of the product. You already knew this somewhere in the dusty attic of your memory, but Glen drags it into the living room and turns on every light.
The same thing happened with the Bubble Wrap comment. You made an innocent remark about wanting to sit in your apartment and pop bubble wrap, which is a very normal and very healthy human desire. Glen didn’t let the moment live. He marched right in and announced you were talking about package cushioning. Because Bubble Wrap belongs to the Sealed Air Corporation and language needs proper handling.
It’s irritating, sure, but once again the correction sticks. Not because Glen is right. He is right, but that’s not why it sticks. It sticks because it reveals how often we use brand names as if they were the products themselves. We forget there’s even a difference. We don’t say facial tissue. We say Kleenex. We don’t say package cushioning. We say bubble wrap, and we’ll keep on saying it for the rest of our lives because bubble wrap sounds like joy, and package cushioning sounds like paperwork.
This is the point in the story where Glen stops being the problem and becomes the doorway. You start realizing just how many names have slipped into your vocabulary without any permission. Sharpie. ChapStick. Vaseline. Post-it. Ones that were trademarks first but became so common that the trademark part fell off like a forgotten coat on the back of a chair.
Most of us don’t think about this shift. We say the words and move on with our lives. Glen is the only one who stops the conversation to point out the accuracy of the term, and while nobody appreciates the interruption, the interruptions do reveal something real.
There was a moment when each of these names was just a brand. A hopeful little thing on a shelf. Then at some point, the culture picked it up and carried it farther than the brand could have on its own. That’s when a name stops being a name and becomes something else. Something sticky. Something universal. Something bigger than the company that made it.
And even though Glen doesn’t realize it, his fact attacks are the opening to a much larger question. If a brand can cross that invisible line and become the default word for a product, what is that line made of? And who decides when a brand gets to cross it?
How a Brand Becomes the Thing
Once you start noticing how many brands have slipped into everyday language, it becomes hard to stop seeing it. You hear someone ask for a Sharpie, and your brain does a tiny flicker because they didn’t say permanent marker. Someone asks if you have a Band-Aid, and nobody reaches for the box labeled adhesive bandages. We ask for ChapStick even when the tube says lip balm. We tell people we need a Jacuzzi when we really mean a hot tub of any make or model. At some point, the brand name took the lead role, and the generic product became the understudy.
But this doesn’t happen to every brand. For every Kleenex, there are a hundred facial tissue brands that never made the jump. For every Post-it, there are stacks of sticky notes sitting around the office wishing the culture had adopted them instead. That’s the interesting part. These brands didn’t become synonymous with their products because they fought harder. They didn’t bully their way into the dictionary. They simply became the name people reached for first.
A brand becomes the thing when it occupies the most mental real estate with the least amount of friction. Which is just a fancy way of saying the culture decided the name was easier than the description. Kleenex is one word. Facial tissue is two, and it sounds like a medical chart entry. Bubble wrap sounds fun. Package cushioning sounds like something you buy when you’re mailing tax documents.
There’s also a bit of timing involved. Many of the brands that crossed into cultural shorthand were early to their categories. They arrived when the idea itself was still forming. So the name didn’t just describe the product. It shaped the entire way people thought about it. Once that happens, it’s very hard for any competitor to crack the code.
But timing doesn’t explain everything. Plenty of early brands disappear without leaving so much as a dent in the language. For a name to become universal, it has to feel right in the mouth. It has to be easy to say, easy to remember, and easy to spread around without sounding like a company is paying you to say it. Nobody wants to tell their friend they need to borrow a “disposable writing marker with indelible ink.” They want a Sharpie.
This shift doesn’t happen through marketing alone. Marketing can get a brand known, but culture is what makes a name stick. People try it on in conversation, it fits, and then they keep using it. The cycle continues until the brand becomes the default term. And once that happens, the company no longer controls how the word is used. The public does, which is both the highest compliment a brand can receive and the start of a completely different problem.
When Culture Does the Marketing for You
Sometimes a brand name slips into everyday conversation without anyone noticing. It isn’t planned, and it isn’t a strategy. People just grab whatever word comes out first, and if the brand is the word they know, that’s the one they use. Nobody stops to think about it. It just happens, and by the time the company behind it realizes what’s going on, the word is already out there living its own life.
When people start using a brand name instead of the actual product name, it usually means the word has settled into their heads in a comfortable way. They aren’t thinking about advertising or loyalty or any of that. They just reach for the easiest word, the one that feels familiar. Most of the time, they don’t even notice they’re doing it.
This is the part marketers dream about but can’t manufacture on command. You can’t force culture to adopt a shortcut. You can only create something worth shortening. Then the public decides whether your name travels or stays put. And once the public decides, there’s no stopping it. You can either celebrate it or worry about it, depending on how close your legal team is sitting to the room.
What’s wild is how quickly this shift can happen once it starts. The minute a name gets passed around with enough confidence, the association becomes self-reinforcing. People hear it more, so they say it more. They say it more, so others adopt it. Before long, the brand name becomes the entire category, even if that wasn’t the plan.
And here’s the part Glen would love. Language is lazy. Not in a bad way. In an efficient way. We prefer words that get us where we’re going with the least mental effort. Kleenex gets there faster than facial tissue. Google gets there faster than internet search engine. Velcro gets there faster than hook and loop fastener. So people choose the easier route and never look back.
When culture decides a brand is the simplest way to talk about something, the brand becomes a kind of public property. Not in the legal sense, but in the way we treat the name. It no longer belongs solely to the company. It belongs to the conversations people have about their daily lives. At that point, the brand isn’t just a brand. It’s a unit of language.
This is the moment when culture becomes the ultimate marketing department, working for free, twenty-four hours a day, inside every sentence spoken by every person who didn’t even realize they were advertising anything at all.
The Double Edge of Becoming Synonymous
Becoming the name everyone uses for an entire category sounds like the dream. Most brands would trade half their marketing budget for that kind of recognition. It’s the kind of thing executives like to imagine happening after a big campaign, as if one good TV spot could turn a product into the word people say without thinking. In reality, it’s never that clean. When a brand reaches that level of cultural saturation, it comes with a price. A surprising one.
The upside is obvious. If your brand becomes the default word for a product, you’ve essentially won the mental real estate battle. You’re the first name out of people’s mouths. You’re the one people think of before they even start the sentence. That kind of presence is powerful. It means you’re showing up in conversations you didn’t pay to be part of. It means your competitors have to work twice as hard just to be remembered at all.
But the other side of it isn’t quite as glamorous. The more people use your name to describe the whole category, the easier it is for your actual identity to get washed out. The name becomes so common that it stops feeling like it belongs to a specific company. At some point, it starts sounding like a general term instead of a brand. Velcro knows this. Xerox knows it. Escalator learned the hard way. Their brand names became generic terms, and the companies lost the legal right to protect them.
That’s the tightrope. You want people to know your name. You want your product to be the one they picture first. But if they say your name so often and so casually that they forget it’s a trademark, you can end up losing the very thing that made you famous. There’s a moment where the brand stops being yours and becomes everyone’s. That might be an honor, but it’s also a risk.
Some companies even have to remind the public that the word they’re using is still a brand name. They send out notices. They correct journalists. They try to pull the name back into the realm of proper nouns. It rarely works. Once culture has adopted a word and made it part of everyday speech, it doesn’t give it back. The public doesn’t care about trademark status. The public cares about whatever word makes life easier in the moment.
That’s the part Glen accidentally stumbles into with his little corrections. He’s pointing out the exact moment where language and branding collide. On one hand, it’s impressive that a name like Kleenex became so dominant. On the other hand, it’s a reminder of how fragile that dominance can be. If a word becomes too universal, the company behind it risks fading into the background. The brand becomes bigger than the business, and the business has to figure out what to do with that.
Can a Brand Engineer This Shift?
This is the part where every brand strategist leans in, because the obvious question is whether a company can actually cause this to happen on purpose. If Kleenex and Sharpie, and ChapStick managed to become the names people use without thinking, then surely there must be a formula. Some secret blend of timing and marketing and magic that turns a regular product name into the default word for an entire category.
But the truth is much less controllable than that. You can’t force a culture to adopt your name. You can’t sit in a boardroom and decide that starting next quarter, everyone will casually refer to your product as if it were the only one that ever existed. Companies try things like that all the time. It almost never works. People don’t follow branding instructions. They follow convenience.
A name becomes the thing only when regular people pick it up and start tossing it around like it’s always been there. That’s not something a company can push into the world with an ad campaign. You can introduce the name. You can try to make it memorable. You can give it a shape and a personality. But whether it sticks is entirely up to the public, and the public often makes choices that don’t line up with a company’s hopes.
Some of the most successful category names didn’t come from companies trying to dominate the language. They came from companies trying to explain what their product even was. Early names tend to be simple because the product is new and needs clarity. The first brand to describe something clearly usually has an advantage. When a category is unfamiliar, people reach for the clearest name available. And if that name is short and easy to repeat, the culture may latch onto it.
But even that isn’t guaranteed. A brand can be early, simple, memorable, and still never become the name people use. There’s an unpredictable quality to the whole thing. A kind of cultural mood. A space in the language that either exists or doesn’t. Brands can prepare themselves for the possibility, but they can’t create the moment. The moment either finds them or passes them by.
And even when a company does end up with a name that becomes universal, it isn’t always something they celebrate. Some fight it because they’re terrified of losing their trademark. Some try to slow it down by reminding people of the “correct” usage. But once the public has adopted a word, it’s almost impossible to take it back. Culture rarely rewinds a choice it’s made. A name that enters common speech stays there as long as people find it useful.
So can a brand engineer this shift? Not really. A brand can prepare for it. A brand can create the conditions where it’s more likely. But the final decision rests with the people out in the world, saying the word without thinking, passing it along to the next person, and slowly turning it into something bigger than the company ever intended.
What This Means for Modern Brands
A lot of newer brands look at the old giants and think it would be great if their name became the one everybody used. It sounds flattering. It sounds like winning. If people reach for your name without thinking, it’s easy to imagine the rest of the success falling into place behind it. But that idea is usually more of a daydream than an actual strategy.
The world now is different from the one that shaped Kleenex or ChapStick. Brands have to fight through noise those older companies never had to deal with. New products appear every day. People compare everything. Categories don’t stay still long enough for one name to settle in and take over. A brand has to be memorable enough to cut through that noise and simple enough for people to talk about without effort. That’s a tough mix to land.
But becoming the universal word for something isn’t the only way to build a strong brand. It isn’t even the common way. Most successful brands don’t become shorthand for their entire category. They grow because they give people a clear reason to choose them. They feel familiar. They feel trustworthy. They solve an actual problem. A brand can be powerful without ever becoming the name people use for everything around it.
The old examples do remind us of one thing. Clarity still matters. A name that’s easy to say and easy to remember will always have an advantage. A product that makes sense right away tends to travel farther one conversation at a time. And if a brand shows up the same way, over and over, people begin to develop a real connection to it. They might not turn the name into a cultural shortcut, but they’ll know it when they see it, and that’s already meaningful.
There’s also something important in the fact that none of those famous shorthand brands seemed to force it. They didn’t sit around plotting how to replace the generic product name. They focused on building something people wanted. They focused on clarity. They showed up in a predictable way. Culture took the lead from there.
That’s probably the most relevant lesson for modern brands. You can’t steer the language. You can only build something real and let people decide how far your name goes if they turn it into the word for the whole category, fine. If they simply trust you enough to come back, that’s just as valuable. You don’t need to become the next Kleenex. You just need to become a name people choose on purpose.
The takeaway
When Glen jumps in with one of his corrections, he thinks he is saving the world from sloppy language. Most of the time, he is just slowing down a moment that didn’t need slowing down. But every now and then, he does point to something worth paying attention to. A brand name that becomes the name for an entire product isn’t just a piece of trivia. It is a reminder of how people absorb ideas and how the right name can work its way into everyday life without anyone noticing.
The real lesson isn’t that every brand should chase that level of fame. It is that people decide how far a name travels. They decide what sticks. They decide what feels easy to say. A brand can set the stage, but the audience decides the rest. And that is where the work really happens. Make something clear. Make something useful. Make something people want to talk about.
At ThoughtLab, we talk about this all the time. A brand doesn’t earn a lasting place in someone’s mind because it shouts the loudest. It earns it because it shows up with purpose and keeps showing up. Clarity. Consistency. A real understanding of the people you serve. Those things matter far more than trying to force a name into the culture. If the name catches on, great. If not, the strength of the brand still holds.
So if there is one thing to carry from Glen and his trivia-filled interruptions, it is this. Build the brand. Build the meaning behind it. Let people decide what the name becomes. That is where the real power sits.
