I’ve googled him on Yahoo
After being introduced in two dictionaries (Merriam-Webster- transitive verb: “to use the Google search engine to obtain information […] on the World Wide Web” and Oxford English Dictionary), “to google” started troubling brand protectors, who asked mass media representatives to stop using company’s name as a verb.
The reason? Naturally, the brand’s erosion. The fear that this phenomenon could translate brand’s name (and implicitly it’s value, of around bil. $12.4) from the company’s ownership to the public domain, and that “to google” might become synonymous with “to search”, and not with / instead of “ to search using Google’s services”
After ridiculing appropriate and inappropriate usage examples (’Appropriate: I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party. Inappropriate: I googled that hottie’) you realize that this fear is somehow justified. If “to google” means “ to search”, who’ll be interested in word etymology over 50 years ? Who will credit Google company from Mountain View, CA for it’s accomplishments?
For example, who knows now that Google derives from “Googol”, which represent the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros?
I xeroxed my courses with a Canon
This Touareg is one hell of a jeep
If you take a good look at my examples you’ll notice that xerox” and “jeep” are written with lower-case letters, while “Canon” and “Touareg” are written with upper-case letters. So, it makes sense why a company which defined a product category isn’t comfortable with becoming the class name next to the proper noun.
It’s not the first time when a company having become a verb or a noun has such a reaction. Another known example is Xerox which (if I’m not mistaken) had protested at a given moment against the official speech of a White House representative who stated that he had “Xeroxed” some acts.
Even though one of the branding “laws” provides that a brand should fight to detain one word in the consumer mind, it seems that the problems appears when that word is actually the brand’s name. Although this denotes the brand’s utmost recognition, there is also a flip side to that coin. In other words, it is grateful for Volvo to detain the word “ security” or for FedEX to detain “overnight”, but when “to google” becomes “ to search”, the brand might suffer.