The Brand That Refused to Die

Here's a little branding quiz for you.

Think of a product name that existed for just three years in the 1990s before losing a trademark challenge. The company name survived in slightly altered form, but the product name was replaced by a series of successor names.

And yet...

More than eleven years after that legal defeat, the original product name is still used, erroneously but ubiquitously, to describe an entire class of products that themselves exist mostly as fading memories.

What's the brand?

I'll give you one hint: it's a technology brand.

Answer after the jump.

The product name is PalmPilot, the first-generation personal digital assistant (PDA) introduced in 1996 by Palm Computing, then a division of U.S. Robotics. The Palm trademark was challenged by pen manufacturer Pilot, which had used "Pilot" as a brand name for its products since 1918. Palm lost, and since 1998 no Palm product has borne the Pilot name. 

In fact, Palm no longer makes PDAs at all. Instead, it makes smartphones (Treo, Centro, Pixi), which have subsumed the old PDA category and added innumerable extra functions.

And yet...

"PalmPilot"—sometimes rendered as Palm pilot or palm pilot—refuses to die. Here are a few examples from 2009 alone:

[A]s Professor Tushnet of Georgetown Law School has documented for her trademark law class, a 2004 Palm pilot [sic] ad campaign included the catchy slogan: “go places, google things.”

—"The Power of the Brand As Verb," New York Times, July 19, 2009. (There was no PalmPilot in 2004.)

"I've been reading ebooks on my Palm Pilot for 5 years."  "I've been reading ebooks for years, first on a Palm Pilot and now on an iPhone."

—Comments #11 and #13, "Cellphone Apps Challenge the Rise of E-Readers," New York Times, November 18, 2009. (The PalmPilot was never capable of being an e-book reader, and it hasn't existed during the last five years.)

Someone apparently removed a screen to a ground-level window and took two Palm Pilot PDAs, valued at $400 each.

—"The Grinch Who Stole the Snow Blower," in The Local, the New York Times's New Jersey blog, December 22, 2009. (Even as antiques, PalmPilots probably wouldn't be valued at $400.)

I don't mean to pick on the Times. Here's an example from the December 21/28 New Yorker:

Next to the chimney, on top of the stove, is a piece of black duct tape with a small silver disk beneath it. Plug the disk into a Palm Pilot, and it will tell you exactly when and for how long that stove was used in the previous month.

—"Annals of Invention: Hearth Surgery," by Burkhard Bilger. Full text available only to subscribers; abstract is here. Citation is on page 91 of the print edition.

And how about this, from last Sunday's edition of the Cape Cod Times:

In an era when Internet access is available in the palm pilot of your hand, it's hard to believe that some Massachusetts residents still struggle for a Web connection.

—"State-federal link boosts Web access," December 27, 2009.

I think that's enough to make my point. PalmPilots: dead. PDAs: dead.* And yet PalmPilot/Palm Pilot/palm pilot lives on!

It's as though all video games were today generically known as Pong. Or as though you called your iPod your Walkman. 

Can you think of another brand with such a short life and such a long-ago death that survives in everyday parlance? I can't.

__

* I still own, and occasionally use, a Palm m130, because I'm too cheap to get a smartphone and don't need mobile web access. A well-placed source once told me that the Palm m-series was named for the University of Michigan, the alma mater of the company's marketing director.

Comments

[Jessica]

You have captured perfectly what I now realize is my subconscious reasoning for steering clients away from PILOT as a trademark for any number of goods or services - I guess in my mind it's still a famous mark because the appearance of the PDA on the technology scene was so dramatic.

[Michael Gury]

Though you reference The New Yorker, you missed one of my favorite cartoons.

Two airline officers are in the cockpit of a jet that has thousands of dials, instruments, etc. The officer on the left has a small handheld unit. The caption is something like:

"Hey, I'm flying this baby on my Palm Pilot!"

[Nancy Friedman]

@Michael: Thanks for reminding me about that cartoon! I found it on CartoonBank.com: http://bit.ly/7O7WND

It was published in February 2000, almost two years after the PalmPilot mark supposedly died.

In January 2000, the New Yorker published a cartoon showing a hooker leaning into a car window and saying to a prospective client: "For an extra fifty bucks, I'll let you show me your Palm Pilot."
http://bit.ly/6otKGU

[Zandr]

And the "PDA: dead" comment is interesting, not because you still use your m130, but because PDAs are alive and well. The PDA grew a cell phone and became a smartphone. So a smartphone without the phone is a PDA, right?

iPod Touch. Apple suddenly owns the PDA market.

[Nancy Friedman]

@Zandr: Point well taken. However, the category is now known as "smartphones," not "PDAs"--interesting, because phoning is often the device's least compelling function. If you go to the Wikipedia entry for Palm, you'll see this sentence under "PDAs": "Palm no longer manufactures any PDAs." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_%28PDA%29

[Lara Pearson]

This fall (2009), my insurance company covered my lost iPhone under my computer endorsement because it was a "PDA". . .