Problem of Brand name substituting product name

"Please give me some Surf". "Get a Colgate". "Make a Xerox copy". Sounds familiar? These are some of the common phrases I heard while shopping at a convenience store. Now problem with this is that most of the time we ended up purchasing an entirely different brand! This is because I could not have returned home empty handed if my mom asked me to buy Surf and if it was not available.

Surf (a detergent brand of Hindustan Unilever) became synonymous to the word detergent in India (at-least) but it is highly probable that the store down the street would not have the particular brand in its inventory. So the seller would give you some other detergent telling "Yeh naya Surf aaya hai. Ise le jao" (Here is a new Surf. Take this).

Now brands which are basically an identity carry some value with it, which is reinforced by the quality of the product over time. Passing on products of other companies as a particular brand definitely cannot do justice to the brand. Imagine washing your clothes with a detergent that was not Surf and getting unsatisfactory results (results claimed by company in TV ad). Now what would a simple homemaker of a semi urban or a village say to others? "Yeh Surf se kapde saaf nai hote!" (This Surf is ineffective). Or perhaps when you get a smudged photocopy and you say that the Xerox is not clear.

A brand becomes so popular that it replaces the name of product and yet the brand somehow not living up to the expectations of consumer. This is quite a paradox. This might not be the scenario in cities where the customer is more aware. Nonetheless companies should not be less careful.

Coming to more recent times the problem has taken a new form. People make verbs out of brand names which are basically proper nouns. Examples ..Google it out, Facebook me. Although next time you sit down to "Google", before entering just check out your default search engine. It is possible that you are using Internet Explorer as your browser and the default search engine is Bing.

In strict marketing literature advertisement, promotion and publicity carry distinct meanings. Why not add one more jargon of consumer education? Or does marketing follow Caveat Emptor (Customer beware)?