UCLA

In trademark law, genericide (the process in which a proper trademark has transformed through public usage to a common noun) is a costly and dreaded occurrence. Trademark owners already take active measures in eliminating the risk of genericide of their marks, and these practices currently include-- among others-- encouraging the use of a trademark as an adjective rather than a noun or a verb. However, many contemporary trademarks still lose distinctiveness because of consumers who misuse the marks. The widespread misuse of trademarks usually manifests morphosyntactically as `adj > noun' conversion (e.g., "I need a band-aid versus I need a BAND-AID adhesive") or `adj > verb' conversion (e.g., "I photoshopped the image versus I edited the image using PHOTOSHOP software"). While these ideas pertaining to improper trademark use are viewed as problematic from legal and corporate perspectives, they are merely neutral and virtually unavoidable linguistic phenomena-- as compulsory language change tends towards efficiency and trademark misuse is inherently a process of promoting efficiency. But based on previous studies of psycholinguistic phenomena in marketing communications and of the neurobiology of language processing, it may be possible to evade these processes. This study seeks to offer additional strategies for trademark owners by applying morphosyntactic markedness principles to trademark advertising, with varying degrees of complexity being applied to broadcast ads, print stimuli, and slogans. The idea is that by appealing to notions of frequency, conventionalization, and processing costs, consumers can be led to avoid improper trademark use in everyday discourse and to better internalize "trademark grammar." The study hypothesizes that these strategies could help the maintenance of trademark distinctiveness and the avoidance of genericide; and the strategies should improve the marketing tactics of trademark owners and thus increase the protectability of their brands.