Name Brands Win

A good friend of mine is an avid recreational sports player in his community. He plays basketball, beach volleyball and ultimate. Apart from his competitive nature, what he’s most intense about is his refusal to call the sport “Frisbee.”

The game itself (with rules much like football) is called “ultimate” but the act of throwing a round, flat object is called “flying disc.”

So why is it that Frisbee is so much more universally known that “flying disc”?

From The Great Idea Finder:

A baker named William Russel Frisbie, of Warren, Connecticut, and later of Bridgeport, came up with a clever marketing idea back in the 1870s. He put the family name in relief on the bottom of the light tin pans in which his company’s homemade pies were sold.

Sometime in the 1940s, Yale students began sailing the pie tins through the air and catching them. A decade later, out in California, a flying-saucer enthusiast named Walter Frederick Morrison designed a saucer-like disk for playing catch. It was produced by a company named Wham-O. On a promotional tour of college campuses, the president of Wham-O encountered the pie-plate-tossing craze at Yale. And so the flying saucer from California was renamed after the pie plate from Connecticut. Of course the name was changed from Frisbie to Frisbee to avoid any legal problems.

Image: www.sxc.hu

So perhaps the Frisbee – or at least Frisbie – came before flying disc. What about other more commonly known brand names?

• Saran Wrap – Plastic wrap
• Frisbee – flying disc
• Kleenex – tissue paper
• Post-It – sticky note
• Scotch tape – clear tape
• White-Out – liquid paper

Now, the question is, does this pervasiveness help or hinder each brand? Does calling everything in that market as the brand name wash away its power? Buying generic tissue paper but calling it Kleenex doesn’t put any money in the bank.