When your brand becomes a verb

Sunday’s New York Times Week in Review writes about the power of the brand as a verb:

Perhaps nothing better illustrates how far behind Microsoft is in the search engine wars than a recent comment by the company’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, about why he liked the name Bing for Microsoft’s new competitor to Google.

The name, he told The New York Times, “works globally” and has the potential “to verb up.” That is, some day, Mr. Ballmer hopes, people will “bing” a new restaurant to find its address or “bing” a new job applicant for telling events in his past.

Notes the Times:

The leader among Internet brands turned verbs, of course, is Google. Imagine the glee in Microsoft headquarters if Google lost its trademark protection to 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!”

On the other hand, when your brand becomes a verb, you know you’ve reached mass market consumer recognition, usually a pretty good indicator for value creation. So far the internet brands that I can think of that are commonly used as verbs are Google, Skype, Facebook, Yelp and Twitter (tweet). What am I forgetting?

(For more from Jeremy, visit his blog)

(Image source:q30design.com)