I cut my finger on the metal capsule covering the cork while opening a wine bottle the other day, so I washed the wound, put some vaseline on it, and, lacking a band-aid, I used a small piece of scotch tape.
The previous sentence is a fundamental illustration of why brand names are so vital to most corporations and how difficult it is for them to protect their brands from genericization. All three products listed in the first paragraph above are brand names and should be capitalized.
As should the word Champagne, because it is a place name in France and as such is protected from anyone else using it to market another product. Champagne, strictly speaking, may only come from Champagne.
Which is why 2,352 cans of beer were destroyed a week ago in Belgium. The beer was Miller High Life, a brand of U.S.-produced beer owned by Molson Coors Beverage Co. It is not marketed in Europe by Molson Coors.
The beer that was destroyed in Belgium had been ordered by someone there. His or her identity was not divulged by customs officials.
Molson Coors was happy to have the beer destroyed because the product carries the phrase “The Champagne of Beers,” a phrase that violates European Union rules that say that certain place names, such as Champagne, are off limits.
This includes wine place names like Bordeaux, Port, Rhine, Beaujolais, and numerous others associated with unique wine districts. Many place names are verboten outside of their own districts.
It works the same way for many other products around the world whose owners might be tempted to use protected place names. Assume that a town in the Duchy of Grand Fenwick named itself “Napa” and decided to put out a wine using that name. It wouldn’t fly.
Champagne is the most obvious wine example of genericization. As with all brand names that eventually become generic, almost all Americans call every bottle of wine that has bubbles “champagne.” I have even heard people who are serving the Italian bubbly prosecco call it “champagne,” which it surely is not.
Which is why the first paragraph of this article was wrong. I intentionally didn’t capitalize the three terms as examples of how brands can be used as generic terms, like the phrase, “I'll have a coke” when the requester simply wants a cola.
Band-Aid is a brand of adhesive bandage that was developed 103 years ago and is distributed by the U.S. pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson. There are plenty of other companies making adhesive bandages. The only Band-Aid product is made by Johnson & Johnson.
Chemist Robert Chesebrough formulated a petroleum jelly now called by the brand name Vaseline in the 1870s. The brand is now owned by Unilever.
In the 1930s, Richard Drew, an engineer at 3M, developed what his company later called Scotch Tape. That term has been widely used generically for many years—much to the company’s dismay.
Styrofoam, to use another example, is a DuPont brand of polystyrene foam, The term should never be used without a capital S. DuPont rigidly protects this name from being used generically.
Whoever ordered the Miller High Life beer in Belgium may not have realized that the brew’s slogan would end up costing more than 2,000 cans, along with the loss shipping costs.
