Here at AlkaViva, we get phone calls from people asking if AlkaViva’s ionized water is “Kangen water®”.
Kangen is no different than Kleenex. Like Kleenex, Dry Ice, Band-Aid, Scotch Tape, Q-tips, White-out, Windex, and Post-It Notes, “Kangen” is often the common, everyday term for ionized water.
If you’ve ever taken a marketing class, you know that branding is one of the most important things any company can do to help sell their products. To break into a marketplace and have everyone become so familiar with your product’s name is every company’s dream…or so you’d think…
“Brand names become generic when they are so commonly used that people associate the brand name for every product of that type regardless of who manufacturers it, or who trademarked the name. The trademark becomes synonymous with a product. And while you would want your product to become that well known, a trademark can lose the right to registration and protection if it becomes generic.” (About.com Inventors)
Typically, when a company invents a product or launches it successfully into the marketplace, the product name becomes its generic name. There are so many familiar products in our lives where this has happened; products like Kleenex, for example. When you have to blow your nose, you don’t ask, “May I please have a facial tissue?”
No, you ask for “a Kleenex”. Why? Because Kimberly-Clark did such a good job of penetrating the original marketplace with their tissues since launching in 1924, that everyone automatically associates the word “Kleenex” with anybody’s tissues. We don’t ask for a “Puffs” or an “Equate” tissue. We ask for a “Kleenex”. The problem here is that when your product’s name becomes this successful, it can actually become meaningless.
So…the next time someone asks, “Is this Kangen water®?” you can say: “It’s so much more. Kangen water® claims to have healthy properties, but it is not clean and will likely contain many contaminants. This is UltraWater; it is the cleanest AND the healthiest water you can drink.”
UltraWater. Now there is a brand!
See more information at https://www.alkaviva.co.nz/pages/alkaviva-water-filter-test-results
See our range of alkaline ionizers at http://www.alkaviva.co.nz/collections/alkaline-water-ionizers
This was originally published at: https://www.alkaviva.com.au/blogs/news/kangen-and-kleenex-one-and-the-same-product-branding-in-the-ionizer-industry
