Do you have sellotape?
Brands that have become synonymous with a product category - such as Sellotape, Kleenex, Bubble Wrap, Chapstick, Escalator or Google - are called brand deonyms.
In linguistics, these are words that have evolved from proper names to become generic names. In marketing, this means that a product has positioned itself through market penetration in such a way that the brand name has become synonymous with its genus. However, what sounds amazing at first is also a brand risk. Some of these brands have actually lost legal protection due to their name's widespread popularity. Escalator, for example, was originally a brand name owned by the Otis Elevator Company. The term escalator was deemed a “generic trademark” in the 1950s.
