How Velcro Lost Its Brand

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How Velcro Lost its Brand

A room full of lawyers, dressed in business suits, singing and dancing about hook-and-loop fasteners.

That's exactly what Velcro did in their 2017 campaign. Professional attorneys crying "We're not Velcro, we're hook and loop!" while holding up laminated signs explaining why you can't "velcro" something to a wall.

The whole thing feels absurd. Here's a billion-dollar company literally begging people not to use their brand name the way decades of successful marketing trained them to.

But there's something fascinating happening here. It's a company fighting for its legal life against the very thing every marketer dreams of achieving.

What happens when marketing is too successful?

The Genericide Trap

Velcro's desperate song-and-dance routine stems from a genuine legal threat called "genericide". It's when brands become so successful at dominating a category that they lose trademark protection entirely.

The graveyard of former trademarks is surprising. Escalator, aspirin, yo-yo, zipper, thermos, kleenex, jell-o, bubble wrap. They were all trademarked products that became so dominant, their names replaced the generic category terms.

Now they're just... words. Anyone can make an escalator, sell aspirin, or manufacture a zipper without paying licensing fees or facing legal action.

Here's the cruel irony. The more successful your marketing becomes, the closer you edge towards losing everything that makes your brand legally protectable.

When consumers start saying "google it" instead of "search for it", or "photoshop this" instead of "edit this", they're not just adopting your brand language. They're actively eroding your trademark protection.

And it happens entirely against the brand owner's wishes.

The psychology is simple. Humans naturally adopt whatever language feels most convenient. If your product becomes so dominant that thinking of the category automatically triggers your brand name, congratulations. You've simultaneously achieved every marketers ultimate goal, while also systematically destroying your intellectual property.

It's the ultimate catch-22. You can't achieve category dominance without risking genericide, but the very success you're chasing is what makes you vulnerable.

Think about it this way. The iPhone didn't become "the smartphone". McDonald's didn't become "the burger". These brands stayed distinctive even while dominating their categories. But when a brand literally replaces the category name in everyday language, that's when the legal problems start.

Fighting the Inevitable

Companies aren't taking this lying down. But watching their defence strategies play out feels like watching someone try to stop a river with their hands.

Google has been fighting the "googling" problem for years. When someone tried to challenge their trademark in 2017, arguing that "google" had become a generic term for internet searching, Google's lawyers fought back hard. They won that particular case because Google have other assets associated with their name besides the search engine, but they're still sending cease-and-desist letters to anyone who uses "google" as a verb.

Good luck with that…

Xerox has been waging this battle longer than almost anyone. In 2003, they ran ads saying "When you use 'Xerox' the way you use 'aspirin,' we get a headache." They've spent decades insisting that "You cannot xerox a document, but you can copy it on a Xerox brand copying machine."

The language is tortured. The message falls on deaf ears. But they keep trying because the alternative is losing everything.

Band-Aid is perhaps the most awkward example. They had a jingle in the 1980s that originally went "I am stuck on Band-Aid, 'cause Band-Aid's stuck on me."

Simple, catchy, memorable.

These efforts largely fail because you can't fight natural language evolution. When millions of people find your brand name more convenient than the generic term, no amount of advertising will change their behaviour.

The chicken-and-egg problem is unavoidable. Achieving the kind of market dominance that makes genericide a threat requires becoming so successful that your brand name naturally replaces category language. You can't have one without risking the other.

When Success Creates Legal Problems

The genericide trap is just one way exceptional marketing success can backfire. Google's recent legal troubles show how brand dominance creates problems that go far beyond trademark protection.

In April 2025, a US federal judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly in online advertising technology. The Department of Justice argued that Google's extensive role in digital advertising represents a conflict of interest that the company exploited anticompetitively.

Every marketer dreams of the kind of category ownership Google achieved. When your brand becomes the default verb for an entire activity, that's the ultimate validation of your strategy.

But here's the twist. True category ownership means your brand name has replaced the category name in consumers' minds. Which legally can mean you no longer own a distinctive brand at all.

The ultimate marketing success story becomes a legal nightmare.

It's not just about trademark protection anymore. When market dominance becomes this complete, antitrust regulators start paying attention. Success that looks like innovation from a marketing perspective can look like monopolistic behaviour from a legal perspective.

The brands we celebrate for "owning" their categories might actually be examples of what happens when growth goes too far. When winning becomes so total that it triggers the very legal mechanisms designed to prevent any single company from controlling entire markets.

What This Means for the Rest of Us

Let's be clear. This isn't a tactical problem most brands will ever face. The chances of your marketing being so successful that it threatens trademark protection or triggers antitrust action are almost zero.

But it's a fascinating thought experiment about the nature of brand success itself.

We're taught that more brand awareness equals better outcomes. Higher consideration leads to market share growth. Category ownership is the holy grail of positioning. But Velcro's singing lawyers suggest there might be limits to how much success a brand can handle.

Think about the assumptions we never question. Is maximum brand awareness always the goal? Should we be trying to make our brand names synonymous with entire categories? What if sustainable brand success requires staying distinctive rather than becoming generic?

Maybe the brands that last aren't the ones that dominate so completely they become the category itself. Maybe they're the ones that resist total category ownership in favour of maintaining brand distinctiveness.

It's a reminder that brand building exists within larger systems of language, law and competition. Push too hard in any direction and you might find yourself fighting battles you didn’t expect to.

Food for thought the next time someone talks about "owning" a category. Maybe the goal isn't to own it so completely that you become it.

Maybe there really is such a thing as too much brand equity.

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