I was going to make this point. While having a huge market share, Apple doesn't dominate in the EU, so generic terms are more common.

Here in the UK people just have "Smartphones" and "tablets" (tho I do hear people calling generic tablets "iPad" sometimes).

I wonder if in the UK the BBC's anti-branding guidelines make a difference; they will almost never refer to a phone as an iPhone unless it's specifically relevant.

I’d say this is by design. A major goal / win in marketing is when your market confuses your brand name with a product category.

The USA, love it or hate it, is the most dominant marketing force on planet earth.

The example may be US-centric, but that really doesn't invalidate the point of the argument: that late comers may come to dominate the market by copying others. I really don't need a global example or eurocentric example to make the point, but if you don't want Apple, take Google's Android, IBM'S PC, etc.

Edit: How about Google? They copied Yahoo and AltaVista, and their search engine has become so ubiquitous with searching that it's a word in the dictionary now.

At least the iPod/Pad/Phone stuff isn't US-centric - these are colloquially used to refer players/tablets/smartphones in many different languages.

I can hardly remember someone using an Apple(or any brand really) product name for the whole product category, it's rare in my experience. Sometimes there's a (grand)parent calling every game console "nintendo", but that's about it.

How about Q-tip? Band-aid? Adrenaline? Kleenex? There's quite a lot of them floating around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

Seems to be much more of a US thing. As a European I'd use the category name for most of those.

Some of the category names don't even match up - adhesive tape is definitely not what comes to mind for Durex for me.

The specific brands are usually country- or region-specific. It's just that you often don't notice the ones that have been genericized in your culture.

Consider: thermos, escalator, linoleum, trampoline, zipper, scotch (as in tape), jeep, xerox, jacuzzi, dictaphone...

>The specific brands are usually country- or region-specific. It's just that you often don't notice the ones that have been genericized in your culture

I think branding to generic really depends on linguistics of target market, brand writers and brand saturation in target market.

A brand name that is hard to pronounce is less likely to be used and how often do you think about the Slovakian pronunciation of your brand?

The US being a large linguistically similar market would be more susceptible to this.

I don't think any of those exist in my country. We do have some older people that call every PND a 'TomTom'.

Of those, the only one I would say that's actually fairly generic is ipod, but that's also the one that's been relegated largely useless as it's an "also" feature of everything else. I don't event here people refer to their non-iphone as an iphone, or their tablet as an ipad. People have have one of those might refer to theirs, and the class in general this way, but given they are actually in the minority of owners for those devices usually, I definitely don't hear it all that often as the generic term.

It all depends on the countries. FWIW, in my experience outside of US and other First World countries, "iPad" for "tablet" is by far the most common, and "iPhone" for "smartphone" is also pretty common. This is more typical of the older (roughly 50+) generation though.

Apple dominates a lot more in many desirable foreign markets.