When Tupperware filed for bankruptcy protection on Tuesday amid slumping sales and rising debt, the news unlocked an airtight seal of nostalgia for many who fondly recalled Tupperware parties and childhood leftovers. Hearts ached for a brand that was seemingly conjoined with the American kitchen — and working women — for decades.
But no matter what happens with the brand, the name Tupperware will never go away — not really. That’s because many consumers will continue to refer to their resealable food containers as Tupperware, even if those containers are not Tupperware. (Most of them aren’t.) And that may have been a part of Tupperware’s problem.
In marketing parlance, a phenomenon that is likely to have played at least a small role in Tupperware’s demise is known as genericization, which is when a brand name becomes so well known that it supplants the product itself. Think of brands like Kleenex, which is synonymous with facial tissue, or X-acto, which has become a stand-in term for any type of modeling knife.
By the way, when was the last time anyone asked for “an adhesive bandage”? People, instead, ask for Band-Aids, even if those bandages aren’t really Band-Aids. And that Ziploc baggie? Amazon sells its own sandwich bags these days. So do Dollar Tree, Whole Foods and a host of other companies.
Tupperware, though, seemed to crumble amid the competition that it helped to create.
“The big, savvy companies know how to protect themselves,” said Charles R. Taylor, a professor of marketing and business law at Villanova University’s School of Business.
Laurie Kahn, a filmmaker whose 2004 documentary, “Tupperware!,” won a Peabody Award, said in a telephone interview that she wasn’t terribly surprised when she heard the news this week.
“I knew it was probably coming because of their recent troubles,” he said. “But it’s sad.”
Her documentary traces Tupperware’s roots, all the way back to the mid-1940s, when Earl Silas Tupper got ahold of some polyethylene pellets, a wartime plastic that the chemical company DuPont did not believe could be molded, and invented an airtight container that could preserve food more effectively than anything else on the market.
The genius of the company, though, was in how those containers were marketed — by a woman named Brownie Wise, who launched the concept of the Tupperware party, where products were peddled by housewives and single moms and other women who simply wanted to work outside the home in the postwar era.
“She empowered an entire generation of working-class women,” Ms. Kahn said.
Soon after Mr. Tupper died in 1983, the patent on his burping seal expired, and a host of companies emerged to copy his idea, Ms. Kahn said.
Patents are designed to last long enough to give the companies that acquire them sufficient time to build up their brands and recoup whatever investments they had poured into research and development. For decades, that was certainly the case for Tupperware, which was a name that had stood for one brand and one brand only.
Name recognition, it seems, is great — up to a point. Suddenly Tupperware had a slew of imitators and rival products that were largely indistinguishable from its own. Tupperware had been genericized, and Rexall, the chemicals company that had purchased the brand decades earlier, was slow to diversify its product line.
“They were perfectly poised to take their absolutely stellar brand name and expand into everything domestic, the way Martha Stewart sells everything domestic,” Ms. Kahn said. “And I think they’d still be alive if they’d done that. But they stuck to plastic containers, and that was a mistake, because then suddenly there were cheap knockoffs in every drugstore and grocery store.”
Successful companies have strategies to protect their trademarks and fend off the creep of genericization, Mr. Taylor said. Many, for example, avoid using the brand name as a noun, choosing instead to use it as an adjective in their marketing materials: Kleenex facial tissues, Q-tips cotton swabs, Velcro brand fasteners. Mr. Taylor also cited Crayola Crayons, a company that was ahead of the curve.
“They were very careful not to refer to them as Crayolas,” he said.
And for various reasons that get into the legal weeds, companies like Google and Kimberly-Clark, which owns Kleenex, have fought (mostly unsuccessfully) to keep their brands from being included in dictionaries, Mr. Taylor said.
Tupperware, though, is a part of the cultural lexicon — even in bankruptcy — and its legacy will persist whenever someone cracks open a resealable food container, even if it is made by Ziploc. Or Rubbermaid. Or Pyrex. Or Freshware.
Tupperware could live on in other ways, too. Ms. Kahn had originally hoped to turn the Tupperware story into a Broadway musical, but she has since shelved that idea — at least temporarily. Instead, she said, a feature film based on her documentary is in development with a production company.
“If we get this feature off the ground, it could be followed up by a musical,” Ms. Kahn said. “It would be a great musical.”
Tupperware may die. Long live Tupperware.
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