There are a few brands that have managed to become so pervasive that they have injected themselves into the common lexicon. When you have left-over food, you put it in a plastic container of some kind. What's it called? Tupperware. It's a brand name, but we use it to describe all plastic containers that hold food. My dad's company has a product that is a thousand times better than Tupperware. It's called Lock & Lock and i still call it Tupperware. When you cut yourself you get a ... band-aid. Another brand name. When i was a kid and i wanted to sugary carbonated beverage i asked for a Coke. I really wanted Dr. Pepper, but i said Coke because i thought that was the generic term for the beverage. Chap-stic, Kleenex, and recently, Google. I think the first time i heard it, regretably, was when i saw that horrible Jennifer Lopez movie, Maid In Manhattan. She told her kid that he could Google something when he got home. And honestly, at the time, i thought that Google paid for the placement in the movie...now it's something we say all the time. Even if my homepage is set to Yahoo (which it was until this week) i would still say that i had googled it.

Well, apparently Google would like us to stop doing this.

It really doesn't make any sense to me from a marketing and branding standpoint. Why wouldn't you want your company to be the only thing people say and think when referring to a product that may have huge competition (like search)?

Apparently AOL and iPod also have a problem with this...are these people stupid? And why are these once "cool" companies losing their cool?