Verb Up and Run Till You Drop
By: PAUL E. THOMAS
October 2009
Microsoft launched its Bing search engine on June 3, 2009.
Just before the launch, Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, spoke enthusiastically of the new Bing trademark as a brand that “works globally,” that “doesn’t have negative, unusual connotations,” and that has the potential to “verb up.”1 Ballmer refers, with this strange phrase, to the curious tendency for people to use a popular brand as a slang transitive verb to indicate the services identified by the brand. “Verbing up” is not something that happens to every brand, not even to ever popular brand, but it does require conditions of exponentially increasing popularity to occur. This aspect of verbing up highlights the subtext of Ballmer’s reference: Microsoft’s clear desire to compete with Google in the search engine market and the fact that “googling” has become synonymous with “searching” on the internet.
Now that Bing has reached its three-month mark, some people are trying to determine whether Ballmer’s hopes are coming true. In a WebProNews article “Do You Use Bing as Verb?,” online journalist Chris Crum wrote “[a]pparently there are people using “Bing” as a verb, although I really haven’t heard this one thrown around in real life yet.” Crum concludes by saying “frankly, I don’t anticipate hearing ‘Bing’ used as a verb too often in the foreseeable future” but nevertheless asks his readers for their views.2 Looking back over the internet evidence of the past three months, transitive verb use of Bing is hard to find, but Jonathan Mann, the musician who has committed himself to writing and recording a song a day, dedicated his song for July 20, 2009, to the search engine by using the mark not as a verb but rather as an interjection: “Bing! Bing! Bing! Bing goes the Internet!”3 One place where verb use did occur is in an article on CNN’s website, which was then ridiculed in TechCrunch by journalist M.G. Siegler, who wonders what people who do not know what Bing is would think of the article’s opening line: “Be cautious if you plan to Bing Jessica Biel . . . a new report says you may get a virus.”4
Any grammatical usage, even sarcastic usage, appears to be pleasing Microsoft. In early August, Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s chief operating officer, said that it is up to Microsoft “to turn this into a verb.”5 Qi Lu, the president of Microsoft’s online services division, said “[w]e are already seeing initial anecdotal evidence that people are using Bing as a verb” and reported that “Microsoft will judge Bing has arrived when it becomes a verb, like Google.”6
From the perspective of trademark lawyers, these statements are eyebrow-raising to say the least. Traditionally, trademark lawyers advise their clients to use their marks as adjectives, and never to use their marks as verbs. The voice of traditional trademark doctrine is unequivocal: using a trademark as a verb may lead to genericization of the term, and generic terms cannot be trademarks because they are commonly used words and thus have no capacity for distinctiveness or exclusivity. Genericization leads to what trademark lawyers call “genericide” – the reversal of fortune that, in certain ironic circumstances, can kill a brand that has become famous and strip it of all power to function as a trademark. Genericide can occur if a brand becomes so widely known that people start using the brand as the common word for the goods or services that the brand identifies. The irony is that every brand owner wants to have a strong and famous brand – strength and fame being measured by the extent to which people recognize the mark and associate it with high quality goods or services – but if the brand becomes universally known, the very thing that brought it to such heights of fame can move it past the tipping point where it loses its strength. Once the genericizing starts, it can become genericide with alarming suddenness, and a brand that had been sailing merrily along under a strong breeze can find itself tipped on its beam within a few short years, then capsized, then sinking, stripped of all ability to function as a trademark that identifies the source of particular goods. These common words are all victims of genericide – aspirin, linoleum, thermos, escalator, cellophane, kerosene, lanolin, trampoline, laundromat, mimeograph, videotape – all were once famous and distinctive trademarks, and all were so universally used that they have become the common property of all English speakers and can probably never again serve as trademarks. 
For these reasons, trademark lawyers who listen to Microsoft’s highest ranking executives express their longing for their new Bing trademark to become a verb also hear, faintly in the background, the Death March from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Do these executives really have a death wish for their own mark? Google was launched in 1997. By 2006, it had become so genericized that the best and most authoritative historical dictionary of English, the Oxford English Dictionary, prepared an entry for “google” as a synonym for internet searching. Merriam-Webster quickly followed suit in its New Collegiate Dictionary. For a trademark, a dictionary entry is like a death certificate. Is this really what Microsoft wants for Bing? Less than ten years of life as a distinctive trademark and then genericization leading perhaps to genericide? Does Microsoft want this so much that they are hoping their new mark will “verb up” in only three months?
I don’t think that is what Microsoft wants. I think Microsoft is using an unconventional brand development strategy that directly questions traditional trademark wisdom about the use of marks as verbs. If you look at the list of marks that became victims of genericide (aspirin, linoleum, escalator etc.), the largest portion by far consists of marks that were popularly used not as verbs but as nouns, as the names of the products they identified, and so genericized by public use until the 
mark became the name for the thing itself. The genericide of marks used as verbs seems to occur much more rarely, and it does not seem to result in a quick death. The most famous examples of genericized verb marks are Hoover (used as a verb “to vacuum’), Xerox (used as a verb “to photocopy”), and, of course, Google. None of these marks is completely dead. Hoover and Xerox are both still registered in the United States and other countries, and both are still considered distinctive trademarks. Certainly, the owners of Hoover and Xerox have lost some power to enforce their exclusivity, and certainly they have had to spend a lot of money in advertising to maintain the distinctiveness of their marks (see the ad to the right), but they have managed to maintain their marks as strong trademark assets over several decades. Google is still registered and does not appear to be weakening as a brand even though Google’s owners cannot prevent people from using phrases like “I googled him to find his contact information.” Microsoft has perhaps realized that genericide for marks used as verbs is a slowly working poison that may numb some of the limbs but rarely reaches the heart.
Whether Microsoft will manage to compete with Google and make Bing a more popular search engine than Google is a large multi-issue question, and one far beyond the limits of this essay; but, on the issue of using a mark as a verb as a conscious brand development strategy, I think Microsoft may be on to something. Perhaps it is time for more trademark practitioners to question the traditional doctrine, as least on the point of using marks as verbs. Instead of hearing Beethoven as the background music for the “verbing up” longings of Microsoft’s executives, perhaps we should be hearing Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” – “Together we could break this trap / We’ll run till we drop; baby, we’ll never go back.”
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1 See “Microsoft’s Search for a Name Ends with a Bing,” by Miguel Helft in the New York Times for May 28, 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/technology/internet/29bing.html?ref=weekinreview.
2 See “Do You Use Bing as a Verb?,” by Chris Crum, posted on WebProNews on September 2, 2009: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/09/02/do-you-use-bing-as-a-verb.
3 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9DBynJUCS4.
4 See “Be Careful If You Bing Jessica Biel. Wait, What?” by M.G. Siegler, posted on TechCrunch on August 25, 2009: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/25/be-careful-if-you-bing-jessica-biel-wait-what/.
5 See “Bing Gives Microsoft a Boost, but Can it Compare with Google?,” posted on August 5, 2009 in Knowledge@Wharton: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2311.
6 See “Ballmer’s Yahoo! Bullishness Hides Bing Brand Play,” by Gavin Clarke, posted on August 5, 2009 in The Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/05/microsoft_yahoo_deal_sec_filing/.