When did brand names become verbs?

Was it when “searching” found a new name as masses of people started “Googling”, or was there a time before the non-evil empire took over the world?

I know genericized trademarks have been around since before my lifetime. The first and best example that comes to my mind is Kleenex. While having a brand name synonymous with a category or consumer action may speak wonders about the brand, I think it also has its downsides. I’m not here to discuss the pros and cons of a category sell though. Not only is that an endless downward spiral of a conversation better suited for uptight brand managers, but it may not even have anything to do with my rant about a slightly less-than creative trend I’ve been noticing lately.

I guess my real concern is whether or not we copywriters are becoming less creative. It seems like we can’t come up with taglines that capture a brand’s essence and compact it into a short but sweet line anymore. You see, more and more I’ve been hearing taglines that include the brand’s name and use it as a verb in the crucial sign-off statements that tie our messaging up in a neat little bow.

“The more you know, the more you Kohl’s, “When you Orbitz, you know”, and more recently, “When you own it, Prestone it” are all examples of what I have a gripe with. Although I like some of the executions of the ideas behind the messaging of these brands, I just can’t condone such misuse of the Advermerican-English language. Through some quick research on Google (an action that may be the anti-thesis of the argument I’m making here) I found I’m not the only one. Check out this facebook anti-fan page dedicated to the Kohl’s slogan http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=99764889194. It doesn’t have many anti-fans yet, but it’s about to have at least one more.

Are we to blame for this trend and the outcries against it, or is it a tactic that clients flock to in order to leverage their brand names and encourage repeated use of them with the hopes of turning their brands into actions? I want to blame clients but I’m not so sure I can. Maybe I should simply be asking if Google is the culprit. Because of the search giant, we don’t even have to know how to spell words right anymore as it corrects our bad grammar for us. Most people don’t think to open up a dictionary because they have a spell checker in their good friend Google. 

It’s possible that Google has done the same to creatives. Maybe we also became so lazy that we can’t even open up a dictionary, in this case to look up definitions of action words. It’s easier to just turn brand names into verbs like Google has done with “Googling”. Webster’s Dictionary recognizes the word; I wonder if I can find it in a thesaurus under the word “search”. Maybe I should Google it to find out.