• by Nikolas Contis , April 16, 2012

Is allowing your brand to “verb-up” a good thing in the long run? Or is it more like shooting heroin -- a short-term high in trade for a crash later?  

Heroin. Hard to imagine it was once a brand name. But it was -- just like Aspirin, Escalator and Xerox. It was a brand name, among many, that suffered the fate of “genericide” -- the buzzword that describes what happens when a brand name becomes generic. Genericide is often associated with the "verbing-up" of brand names.

Getting that brand "high" through colloquial adoption is really tempting. When consumers “Google” something instead of "searching" for it or when they “Skype” their friends and families, they acknowledge tacitly that those brands are new points of reference -- new gold standards in the category, or even inventors of the category. What brand manager or CMO wouldn’t be tempted by that? 

Yet getting that “high” is fraught with risk. And corporate lawyers take it very seriously.

In 2004, Xerox forbade the use of "Xerox" as a verb, although some dictionaries still list it as such. Google got cold feet about being a verb in 2006 and issued a similar proclamation that year, and in 2011 Adobe expressed similar concerns about Photoshop.

Can the risk be navigated? Is there a difference between creating a new reference point by “verbing-up” safely versus allowing your brand name to be diluted into a common term with no trademark protection?

In legal terms, when a brand name becomes generic it becomes descriptive of (or synonymous with) a general class of goods or services. The name no longer holds “secondary meaning” within a class of trade -- the kind of “meaning” that would otherwise distinctively indicate a specific source of or affiliation with a product or service. Technically, it becomes metonymic. In plain English, it no longer holds water as a trademark.

Four key, overlapping legal concepts are at play here:

1. The concept of protection: the vigilant protection (or lack thereof) of your brand name as a trademark to identify goods or services that come from a unique source.

2. The use of a clear, tertiary descriptive term: your use (or failure to use) and/or establish an adequate, tertiary descriptive term other than the brand name itself.

3. The concept of managing mindshare in the context of source identification as a mark’s primary significance or purpose: the management of public perceptions as to whether your name is or is not synonymous with your product, service, category or description of goods or services -- it’s all about whether or not the “primary meaning” of the mark has “become” the product or service itself.

4. The concept of source-loyalty motivation: a clear understanding of the drivers that influence a consumer to “want” to have or be loyal to your particular product or service based on affiliations between the brand name and “you” as the producer of the product or service.

Wow, that’s a lot of legal-speak! So is the branding “high” of “verbing-up” worth it? Or will “verbed-up” brands suffer in the long run? With brands like Google, time will certainly tell.

But does it really matter if consumers actually care where the in-line skates come from when they are “rollerblading” down the street? From both a branding and a “genericide” standpoint, it matters a lot.

Yet Rollerblade remains a trademark -- albeit one in potential jeopardy. And it’s not likely that you will get many complaints from Google marketing execs because people “Google” stuff. But who knows -- their lawyers might still be screaming about this and sending letters. I wonder if the powers that be at Twitter will command us to stop twittering and tweeting. And if they do, will it be in the form of a letter or a tweet?

Either way, it seems prudent to maintain the best of both worlds if you are lucky enough to have this problem. For now, if I were Google, Photoshop, Twitter or any of the other brand names fortunate enough to be embraced by pop culture, I’d ride the high.

Google will do just fine. And personally, I intend to keep on Googlin.’