Companies discover the power of the brand as verb

Mint
Perhaps nothing better illustrates how far behind Microsoft Corp. 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 Inc.

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

It once would have been unthinkable for a company such as Microsoft to encourage people to use its brand name so cavalierly. Businesses feared that if their product name became a verb, then it would lose its individual identity.

Consider the case of Xerox Corp., which has long urged consumers to “photocopy” rather than “xerox” documents. The fear was that if “to xerox something” became another way of saying, “to photocopy something”, the term would end up defining not what Xerox is (a company that makes a distinctive brand of copiers), but what Xerox’s products do (make photocopies). In the process, the difference between Xerox and its competitors would begin to melt away.

Twitter is on the other side of the spectrum from Bing—it is growing fast and needs to worry about protecting a popular brand. So it was not surprising that Twitter recently decided to apply to trademark the term “tweet”, which has become the accepted verb for sending a message on Twitter.

Even so, one of Twitter’s founders, Biz Stone, stressed in a blog post on 1 July that the company would not be “‘going after’ the wonderful applications and services that use the word in their name when associated with Twitter”.