Lately, I’ve heard less about people getting online to do a web search for something and more about people “googling” for things. For instance, I might be sitting in my living room with my wife when we decide a rum cake sounds delicious. I might say “Honey, can you go google ‘rum cake recipe’ for me?” If my wife uses Yahoo! for the web search, is she still googling? Apparently.

The concept of a brand name becoming the term that is used to refer to a product or service in general is not a new one. I clearly remember growing up in St. Louis, and always referring to facial tissues as “kleenex”. Now, it’s a well known fact that my family almost exclusively uses Puffs. Still if I were at the grocery store with my mom, she would tell me to run down aisle 13 and pick up a box of kleenex. I knew that the type of kleenex we used was Puffs. I was 10 years old before I realized that Kleenex and Puffs were actually two distinct brands of facial tissue.

There are many other examples too. Almost any fruity frozen novelty on a stick is referred to as a Popsicle. When you put your Levi’s on in the morning, you may actually be wearing jeans made by the Arizona Jean Company. Is that really a Band-Aid on your knee, or some other type of bandage. Would you correct a mistake with Wite Out, or the generic store brand of correction fluid. Perhaps you’ve even Xeroxed something on a Canon color copier.

The real question is how does one achieve this status for their company? In some cases, the product or service was the first of its kind and there really was nothing else to call it until copies of the original product were developed by other companies. By then, the brand name term had already penetrated too far into the consciousness of the general public for other companies’ names to make a big difference. In other case, the product or service so outperformed its competition, that its name became synonymous with the product or service itself.

Assuming you aren’t in the process of mass marketing your new invention, the best you can do right now is just continue being the best at whatever it is you do. You never know, maybe your company will be the next “Super Glue“.