A few days ago, I read, not entirely in disbelief, that Peaches Geldof did coke so extensively that she was nicknamed “Dyson” by her friends. Peaches Geldof is famous for having a celebrity parent, rocker Sir Bob Geldof, the main man behind Live Aid back in the 80's. She is also famous because her mother was Paula Yates, now deceased, dead because of a drug overdose. And Paula Yates was a British TV presenter and also a writer, whose last relationship was with Michael Hutchence, who was found hung in a hotel room in Sydney.
My first thought was,”Why Dyson?” As I read further, I discovered her friend was quoted as having said, “Peaches is the biggest hypocrite I know. She would go out on a drink and drug bender with us, then days later publicly claim to have a squeaky-clean, drug-free image. Every time the cocaine came out, she was there first to hoover it up.” A light went on in my head. In Britain, Dyson is a famous vacuum cleaner brand. If Peaches was elsewhere in the world, she would have been nicknamed Hoover.
And then I started thinking of the various brand names which are part of the every day language that we use, perhaps to the extent that we don't think of them as brand names anymore.
Google is a very good example. In the movie Maid In Manhattan, Jennifer Lopez's son was a big fan of Simon & Garfunkel. He asked her, “Why'd they break up?” Lopez answered,”You got me. You can google it at school.” And to probably 90% of us, “google” means to “do an internet search”. We wouldn't think of, say, Metasearch or MSN Live Search.
Fedex is another good example. Fedex used to be known as Federal Express. In the 1990's, however, it noticed that customers routinely referred to it as “Fedex”, and also started using it as a verb, as in “Let's Fedex this tomorrow”. So in 1994, the company decided to go with the flow and changed its name to Fedex. It even had a new motto: “The World On Time” - and the company's name is now synonymous with punctual overnight delivery.
Xerox's experience was similar in that the word "xerox" is also commonly used as a verb. However, its continual usage may place the trademark in danger of being declared a generic word by the courts - hence un-differentiating Xerox from other printing companies. In 2008, Xerox did a spot of rebranding by changing its logo to a red sphere with a white X with three grey stripes, and attempt to move the public's attention from the image of Xerox as a photocopier manufacturer to document management and creator of printing solutions.
Brand name usage as verbs could go too far, it would seem.
