The Social Customer Manifesto has a post about Lego(R) putting up a notice if you go to legos.com that the name that people have commonly referred to its products might not be preserving the brand. We are not supposed to call them Legos. They are Lego bricks or Lego toys.
The comments also mention that the use of the word Google as a verb also apparently dilutes the Google brand.
Hah. Hahahahahaha.
Come on. It isn’t like someone will call a competing product legos (lowercase). It isn’t like I will tell someone to Google something and watch them bring up Yahoo! or MSN without a second thought. How does it dilute your brand when they use the name for YOUR products?
When people say want to eat Chef Boyardee, are we going to go find them and teach them to not dilute the brand because they are really eating a Chef Boyardee food product? What about when someone says “Check out my new Nikes” when they are referring to their Nike shoes? Doesn’t “Dude, you’re getting a Dell” dilute the Dell brand since you are really getting a Dell PC?
Of course, there are some concerns. People DO call competing products Legos even though Lego doesn’t make them. People do refer to all tissue paper as Kleenax. People xerox copies of paper on non-Xerox copiers. So maybe it isn’t so funny.
But I still think of them as Legos and I’ll still google.