Spam, Lego And Yo-Yos

Spam. What exactly is it? For one thing, it's a famous trademark. More specifically, it's Hormel's name for a luncheon meat that contains pork shoulder, spices and ham. As the saying goes, anything more would be “too much information.” But there is more worth knowing—about Spam and about trademarks—and that's the subject of this month's column.

Trademarks are odd things. Their principal reason for existence is name recognition. Companies spend billions promoting their trademarks, all with the goal of having consumers readily identify their trademarks. Yet a trademark can become so well known that it takes on a life of its own, and in so doing can lead to its own demise.

Take the Lego trademark. The Lego Group has attempted to educate the public that kids don't play with “Legos,” they play with “Lego bricks.” That was the message that popped up for consumers for many years when they visited Legos.com instead of Lego.com. (Note the extra “s.”) The Lego Group was (and is) concerned that the Lego trademark may become “generic”—meaning that it no longer identifies a particular brand of bricks sold by Lego under the Lego trademark. That's because a term becomes generic when, instead of acting as a trademark for the products of a single company, it identifies a class of products.

Many everyday terms that are now generic were formerly trademarks for products sold by a single company: aspirin, escalator and trampoline, to name a few. In the toy industry, the most famous example—at least in the U.S.—is “yo-yo.” (Yo-Yo is still a trademark in Canada). Yo-Yo has been a common reference to all U.S. companies' returning top toys since at least 1965, when it was ruled a generic term, much to the dismay of the Duncan Toys Co., which brings us back to Hormel.

Believing that its Spam mark should extend beyond the grocery aisle, and beyond the limits to which it had expanded, Hormel recently sought to stop one company's use of the mark SPAM ARREST, for software designed to stop unsolicited email. Not surprisingly, Hormel lost, given the ubiquitous use of the term “spam” to refer to unwanted email. For at least the last 10 years, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has refused Hormel's application to cancel the SPAM ARREST mark.

So the lesson this month is too much notoriety for a product can be a bad thing—at least in the trademark world. Owning a strong trademark for a narrow class of goods is better than destroying your trademark by stretching it too far, or wasting your money seeing how far you can stretch it. Market your products aggressively. But don't be greedy and bite off more than you can chew.