NEW YORK – When Tupperware filed for bankruptcy protection on Sept 17 amid slumping sales and rising debt, the news unlocked an airtight seal of nostalgia for many who fondly recalled Tupperware parties and childhood leftovers.
But no matter what happens with the brand, the name Tupperware will never go away – not really. That is because many consumers will continue to refer to their resealable food containers as Tupperware, even if those containers are not. And that may have been a part of Tupperware’s problem.
In marketing talk, a phenomenon that is likely to have played at least a small role in Tupperware’s demise is known as genericisation, 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. And that Ziploc baggie? Ikea sells its own sandwich bags, and so do 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 Professor Charles R. Taylor, who specialises in marketing and business law at Villanova University’s School of Business.
Ms Laurie Kahn, a film-maker whose 2004 documentary, Tupperware!, won a Peabody Award, said in a telephone interview that she was not terribly surprised when she heard the news this week.
Her documentary traces Tupperware’s roots, all the way back to the mid-1940s, when Mr Earl Silas Tupper got a hold of some polyethylene pellets, a wartime plastic that chemical company DuPont did not believe could be moulded, 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 Ms Brownie