#39: When a Brand Becomes a Verb

The ultimate prize in branding

Ask yourself, how often do you use the following phrases (or some variation of them)?

“Let’s Uber there.”

“I’ll Venmo you later.”

“Just Google it.”

Let’s try this exercise without the brand names.

“Let’s take a car.”

“I’ll pay you back later.”

“Look it up on a search engine.”

These phrases were reasonable to use before Uber, Venmo, and Google came around. Now, they leave a sense of ambiguity. Check out below for reasonable questions to ask back to the generic phrases.

Uber - “Whose car are we taking?” or “Where will we be parking?”

Venmo - “How will you pay me back?” or “Will it be cash or a check?”

Google - “Which search engine will you use?” or “How will you find a search engine?”

For the first phrase list with the brand names included, there’s no misinterpretation. No follow up questions necessary. The brand name is the most efficient way to communicate a specific action.

When a brand becomes a commonly used verb, it’s game over for everyone else. Sure, there’s always market share to steal, but it is unlikely that any SEO tactic or viral stunt is going to wedge a challenger brand into everyday language. The brand name becomes shorthand for the action itself, leading to the most powerful form of marketing: word of mouth.

Interestingly, none of these brands (Uber, Venmo, and Google) were the first of their kind in their niche. Lyft’s founders started a ride-share project called Zimride before Uber gained traction. And you have Venmo’s owner, PayPal, founding peer-to-peer payments over ten years before Venmo was born. Furthermore, Yahoo launched its search engine years before Google began developing theirs.

So, you don’t need the first mover advantage to build a superior product on a global scale. These products became so useful that the brand name became shorthand for the action.

Despite the number of challengers that each of these omnipresent brands have faced, none have come remotely close to toppling the brand verb itself. Let’s be real. No one says, “let’s Lyft there”, “I’ll Bing it”, or “Let me Zelle or CashApp you” (Okay, I’ve heard CashApp in a few rap songs, but the CashApp monthly active users are tens of millions lower compared to Venmo's).

So how does a brand become a verb? Here’s my two cents.

A World-Class Product

A truly superior product to what’s currently on the market. Google’s search results are magnitudes more relevant than Yahoo’s or Bing’s. Whenever I accidentally search on a non-Google search engine, I’m starkly reminded why Google is the undisputed #1. Its user experience is cleaner and more transparent, the ads are more curated, and the results themselves help me arrive at an answer quicker than their competitors’.

Google redefined how humans search and discover information worldwide (well, besides China because it’s banned there). The search engine product is nearly everywhere and for anyone.

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The Product Solves a Universal Problem

Public transportation can’t take you everywhere you need to go. And even if it can, it may not always be the most convenient option. Even if you’re traveling between two parts of a city with robust public transit, riding in a car may be the most efficient solution. And in more rural areas, owning a car is a requirement to get places.

Uber solves the transportation problem for nearly everyone. They allow you to rely on someone else for your transportation, as well as allow you to make extra money by providing transportation to others. When you need to go to the airport, why worry about where to park your car and its corresponding daily cost? Also, when you’re headed back from the bars, how are you getting home? Uber is there for you.

There are many implicit costs associated with car ownership, like insurance, parking, and maintenance that aren’t necessarily tied to getting from point A to point B. For city dwellers, it can be considerably cheaper to Uber everywhere compared to owning a car.

Additionally, Uber has done a relatively good job on ensuring safety for drivers and riders by revealing identity on both sides. Getting into a taxi can be a sketchy experience from the driver’s perspective as they don’t really know who they are picking up. With ride sharing services, both the driver and the rider have their identity out in the open.

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Network Effect

Products whose success is determined by the size of their network require a sheer amount of scale, but if achieved, they create a flywheel effect that is bound to bring success. Venmo is only useful because there are a lot of people that have a Venmo account and actively use their Venmo account. They offer a nearly frictionless setup (create an account and connect your bank account through Plaid, in under five minutes). Venmo eliminated friction in peer-to-peer payments through an aesthetically pleasing user experience and a built-in social feed. Sure, the social feed that highlights how your friends are spending their money may not be captivating as Instagram’s feed, but it offers light entertainment and a sense of community.

Network effects are so powerful for a brand as they create a flywheel effect of new user acquisition through happy customers who want to use the product as much as possible. The more of their friends and family that use the product, the more useful it becomes for everyone.

Think about it. If you go out to dinner with four friends and put the bill on your credit card, you’re going to want to collect payment for the dinner from your friends somehow. Cash can get tricky and isn’t overly divisible unless you have a full range of $1s, $5s, $10s, and $20s on you always.

Say two of your friends have Venmo, but the third friend does not. You’ll turn into a used car salesman trying to convince them to download the app to simplify collections for yourself. In this common scenario, you are the marketing engine for Venmo, who did not pay a cent to acquire your third friend as a customer. It’s the beauty of the network effect.

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I believe there’s a common characteristic amongst these three brands (Uber, Venmo, Google). They are all tech products. The first time you used them; you probably thought you were experiencing magic (or at least I thought I was). Top-tier tech feels almost magical; something physical products rarely replicate. Now, there are physical product brands that have become synonymous with nouns like Aspirin, Advil, or even a Post-it note. However, in today’s day and age, tech has a higher likelihood of meeting these criteria, driven by its ability to influence network effects. I do think it’s worth further expanding on brands that are nouns though. We’ll touch more upon this phenomenon in a future post.

Here's my bet: I believe the next brand that becomes a verb is OpenAI’s ChatGPT. I’ve already been hearing phrases like “Just chat it” or even used as a noun “Ask Chat”, meaning to ask ChatGPT for the answer. ChatGPT hits on each criteria point. It is hands down a superior product than traditional search. If you disagree, ask yourself: why is Mark Zuckerberg offering $100M contracts to OpenAI researchers? And if you need more evidence, why has Google begun emphasizing Gemini (Google’s LLM) AI Overviews at the top of most searches?

ChatGPT inherently demonstrates the problem it solves.

Reply with which brand you think will become the next verb. Let’s get the discussion started!