Finding a global trademark in two syllables that doesn’t mean anything inappropriate is virtually impossible today. However, SCA managed to do so with its TENA brand.
With a global market share of 26%, SCA is the leading supplier of incontinence protection. Since 1992, products of the same name have been sold worldwide. However, to enable the registration of the successful TENA brand name in all countries required much painstaking effort, which was initiated alreadyin the 1970s.
At that time the first body-shaped incontinence protection for adults was introduced. Since the shape of the product clearly resembled the letter “T,” it was designated internally as the “T-Form (form is the Swedish word for shape).” This would subsequently be the name assigned to the finished product. When the first nighttime incontinence product was introduced some years later, it was christened “T-Night.”
In the early 1980s, the idea was formulated to register TENA as a trademark – TENA as a combination of T (for form) and NA (for night). However, it proved difficult to secure approval as a stand-alone name. Accordingly, such one-word product names as TENAform, TENAdor and TENAflex were used for many years – until 1992 when SCA changed the names of all of its incontinence products throughout the world to TENA. By then the TENA brand was so well-known that the registration was approved.