Jeff Random - new media and metatheory remix » Integrated Marketing

BrandVerbs – Brands that become verbs.

r8ndom — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 12:02:50 +0000

During an online conversation I recently came up with the word Brandverb.

A brand becomes a brandverb when it becomes commonly used in place of a verb.

It used to be that brand managers were always concerned about having their brand fall into the public domain. The travails of Xerox and Kleenex were legendary as they tried to prevent genericide. Aspirin, linoleum, nylon, escalator, kerosene and zipper are all former brand names that have become generic.These days brandverbs seem to be the mark of success instead of the kiss of death, becoming useful when they carry a better meaning than the generic term they replace and spreading the brand awareness.

For example when someone says they will Skype you, it serves to reinforce using a particular VOIP service.

Without doing any due diligence, or even bothering to Google (look it’s a brandverb) for info, I notice a correlation to noun based brands becoming genericized when popularized, and brandverbs becoming stronger when popularized.*

It seems as though if a brand lends itself well to becoming a brandverb, then it is an advantage. Maybe it’s an edge in culting your brand, maybe it helps through WOMB (word of mouth branding), maybe it’s more.

These thoughts have lead some serious second thoughts about the brand for a project, including potentially scrapping a nice 5 letter domain for a project.

* Xerox seems to be somewhat of an exception as you can Xerox something, but perhaps their danger was based on people buying ‘Xerox Machines’ from HP and others?

Mainstream Crossover Porn Sensibility

r8ndom — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 02:53:13 +0000

This fantastic video

is an deft piece using the long standing adult industry marketing tradition of parody in reverse. In this case it self referentially honors and adds new media production values to adult marketing archetypes.

The site itself is a great example of what mainstream can learn from the adult industry. The site uses ‘traditional’ adult internet marketing tools, to produce an innovative mainstream offering.

This includes a warning page with age verification, the equivalent of a Free Hosted Gallery (FHG), sample movie etc. the only thing missing was a join page link.

If they were an affiliate program I would send traffic to them.

Secure, Memorable & Global

r8ndom — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 01:14:10 +0000

Making your brand Secure, Memorable, and Global sounds like what an IP firm, and or marketing agency should do for you. As domain names = brands more and more it’s also the properties that you would like to have your indentifier (brand and/or URL) have on the internet.

Up until now Zooko’s Triangle has argued for ‘choose any two’ in the same way that you can generally ‘choose any two’ amongst Good, Fast & Cheap.

Now Marc Steigler suggests a system for making “secure, memorable, and global identifiers to use on the Internet”

The PetName system allows unique, global, and memorable identifiers by using trusted relationships.

The metatheory extrapolates well whether you use the example of preventing paypal phishing, or apply the theory to purchase recommendations.

Beyond Backlinks -Search Conversations

r8ndom — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 19:37:38 +0000

TalkDigger is a great tool that lets you search conversations about a specific URL.

This is a metasearch that covers Technorati, Google Blog, Bloglines, Feedster, BlogDigger, Icerocket, MSN Search, Google, Yahoo!
You can outuput the results as an RSS feed to keep track of your sites and stay involved in the conversation.