34 trademarked brands that have become household names

Don't call any old frozen treat a Popsicle — that's a registered trademark of Unilever.

Gabriel Olsen/Getty Images

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Sometimes there is a downside to being successful.

In the corporate world, if a company's product is popular enough, it risks something called genericization, which is when the public associates the brand name with the generic class of product itself.

That's the fate that befell Kleenex. Although Kleenex is a registered trademark of Kimberly-Clark Corporation, for many consumers, the word has become interchangeable with "tissue."

Other brand names that have fallen victim to genericization include Google, Taser, and Xerox. Even common words like kerosene and escalator were once trademarked.

We've compiled a list of 34 famous brands that have become genericized, either formally or informally. While all of them have been trademarked at some point in their histories, a few of them have actually lost legal protection due to their name's widespread popularity.

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