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Comment by econgeeker | Hacker News Reader

What I really wonder, reading this story, is how he would have done if he'd gotten a product that didn't look like an iPod.

What percentage of his customers were thinking they were buying an iPod?

My nephew, one day, came to me excitedly telling me he was getting an iPhone and he showed me an ebay page with a "new in box" iPhone for $50. (he had $50 in birthday money to spend.) It was not an iPhone, but it looked like one. He's too young to understand, I think, the existence of knock off products.

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Why would you think it was an iPod unless it said iPod in the description?

Did your nephew's page mention "new in box iPhone"? You left the quote out of the iPhone so I'm wondering if it actually said iPhone in the ad. If it did that's a completely different situation. If it didn't then your nephew would've gotten what he paid for. A "new in box"....something that looks like an iPhone.

Not sure why I'm being downvoted here. Is it normal to assume that a two blade razor is a Gillette two blade razor simply because they look the same? Unless it says "Gillette" somewhere you shouldn't assume it is such. I'm legitimately curious to know whether this person was selling phones under a false name. And moreso, whether the OP was selling his mp3 players under a false name.

Never forget, even smart people make stupid mistakes and it just gets worse from there. People often use brand names to fill in for categories. Ex: Kleenex for tissue, coke for soda etc. What's really odd is people will sometimes buy something like a box of tissues and think "Kleenex" even if it's not on the box. People reversing the category name with the brand name is a basic issue, but there are plenty of ways to encourage the effect.

What's really interesting IMO, is it's such a common effect that there have been a wide range of court cases based around how generic a brand has become and how people exploit it. Thus your packaging really can be too similar to competitors even if everything else is fairly unique.

The brand identity inherent in a product's packaging is called "Trade Dress", and it's a protected form of intellectual property just like trademarks.

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