To Verb Or Not To Verb?
Some brands just seem to have it all; great product(s) and/or service(s), satisfied customers and a unrelenting rise of revenue, and the brand has become a verb. Best example nowadays is “Googling” your way through the internet, or “Let me TiVo that” and somewhat little recent “Xeroxing documents.”
While in the not so distant past companies did all they could to prevent the brand turning into a verb (Google, TiVo, Xerox), today is different. Steve Ballmer hopes with Bing the actual of notion of people “bing” a restaurant to find its address or “bing” a job applicant for telling events in the past. If you would hear (and understand) Why don’t you Bing it? Steve is a happy man.
Cartoon: Charles Barsotti
Brands are trademarked and a lot of effort and money go into the creation and protection of that brand to prevent economic damages to intellectual property. By controlling the use of their brand name, businesses hope to put off the day when the name grows so popular that it defines all similar products on the market. When that happens, a brand has been lost to “genericide,” lawyers say. That means that the term is so prevalent, or generic, that it no longer sticks to a single company.
But this is actually what Bing is trying to achieve. Better to get the market share when you can and worry later, when the brand becomes part of the popular vernacular and less distinctive in the process.
On the other hand, Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s co-founders, announced the trademarking of “Tweet”, the generally accepted verb for sending a message with Twitter. And controlling who uses the words Twitter or Tweet would be a way of gaining some form of exclusivity. However, Twitter will not actively be ‘going after’ the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter.”
Brand protection through trademarks will give you exclusivity and prevention of genericide. If “google” becomes synonymous with conducting an Internet search, then Microsoft could legally and confusingly advertise by saying: “Use Bing for all of your most complicated googling!”
Turning a brand into a verb will (actively pursuing this or letting it happen) could create an increase and long term top of mind awareness.
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This is true:
Turning a brand into a verb will (actively pursuing this or letting it happen) could create an increase and long term top of mind awareness
But now how to do that…
Cheers
First I would say a good name helps. To be honest, I think Microsoft did a good job choosing Bing for their search engine. A simple, powerful word.
Secondly, you want people to associate the (brand)name with the action.
With that in mind you can work on building your brand into a verb.
But keep in mind, an important question is whether you want to prevent genericide or claim the action.
A funny, but on-the-spot movie made by Collegehumor. says it all (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0MKdjG1F_c)
Building a brand is one of the most important aspects of a successful business. This post almost make it seem like a bad thing to genercide one brand, however, even if people are violating a trademark or copyright the brand should be happy that they are being talked about and sticking in consumers minds.
@Promotional Products
My intention of this post was to raise the question whether genercide is good or bad. Some brands need it, others perhaps not.
I think it is dependant of brand targets.
Marc, this is a great post and topic, thanks for sharing your perspective.
While I can appreciate the business and marketing benefits of “verbing” brands, properly done, I don’t see how true genericide can be good under any circumstances because it opens up what once was a protectable name to one that can freely be used by anyone, most importantly, direct competitors.
So, it is hard to imagine how Otis Elevator (once the owner of a brand called Escalator) could be happy that “escalator” is now a common dictionary term with no brand meaning whatsoever. Most people probabably don’t even know the history or attribute the generic escalator term to Otis, so where is the benefit of true genericide?
Having said that, as a trademark lawyer, I recognize that the most common legal advice is not to “verb” brands, period, to avoid the “slipper slope” of genericide, and there are definately large companies flirting with “verbing” their brands, so my contention is lawyers need to find creative ways to not get in the way of the business and marketing benefits of “verbing,” but at the same time take creativ legal steps to prevent genericide.
So, the goal, it seems to me, is to reap the benefit, but avoid the certain brand death of genericide — that can be and is a delicate balance, but I believe the balance is possible to strike, when trademark types and marketing types are working in very close collaboration.
If you’re interested, I have posted a series of three articles on this topic in a Just Verb It? series: (1) http://www.duetsblog.com/2009/07/articles/just-verb-it-part-iii-testing-the-slippery-slope-of-using-brands-as-verbs/; (2) http://www.duetsblog.com/2009/06/articles/just-verb-it-part-ii-a-legal-perspective-on-using-brands-as-verbs/; (3) http://www.duetsblog.com/2009/06/articles/just-verb-it-a-legal-perspective-on-using-brands-as-verbs-part-i/.