The iPad tablet is extremely popular and almost the entire world recognizes the name of the tablet when they hear it and associate the name with the Apple product. Well, this association could be diluted in the near future because users could use the name iPad for any similar products on the market, something that happened in the past with other brands such as: aspirin, Xerox, thermos, etc. Practically, an extremely popular brand can become a generic name if the general public does not associate that brand with a specific product or product line and Americans say that the iPad brand could turn into a generic one if Apple does not protect it properly.
Apple is on the verge of doing what few others have: changing the English language. When you have a boo-boo, you reach for a Band-Aid not a bandage. When you need to blow your nose, you ask for Kleenex not tissue. If you decide to look up something online, you Google instead of searching for it. And if you want to buy a tablet computer, there's a good chance there's only one name you'll remember. "For the vast majority, the idea of a tablet is really captured by the idea of an iPad," says Josh Davis, a manager at Abt Electronics in Chicago. "They gave birth to the whole category and brought it to life."
The name Xerox is the best example of transforming a brand into a generic term because the world uses the term to copy pages using a machine specially made for this purpose, but not all of them are produced by Xerox. For the iPad, I think that the transformation could not take place so easily considering that there is a clear distinction between tablets and the iPad, but we do not know what will happen in the future. Apple took care to protect the iPod brand and will do the same with the iPad because diluting the brand would not be beneficial at all for a company that controls more than half of the tablet market.
