MapQuest: Brand Success, Service Failure

I have a quick thought that I’d like to express to you about how a brand name can be a resounding success yet it doesn’t help the company or service that the brand is attached to.

The Story

I was catching up on the latest season of Smallville the other day and was watching the season finale. One of the characters was in a maze of a building’s air ventilation system and as he was getting navigation directions from another character on the phone he said, “You are my personal MapQuest”. That statement really got me thinking about how often I still hear people use MapQuest as a common vocabulary word, yet I personally haven’t used the service in over 8 years.

The History

MapQuest was one of the first companies in the online map game and for a while they were the only service people were using. Then Google completely changed the game when they decided to get serious about online maps with AJAX maps. After that most people switched to the superior Google Maps while the other players starting playing catch up. Now I personally use Yahoo Maps because I think they do things even better than Google does. I’ve been so satisfied with those two that I have never considered going back to MapQuest.

The Thought

When I hear someone discuss needing online directions it often references MapQuest, such as, “Just MapQuest it” or “I printed the MapQuest to your house”. Are people still actually using MapQuest.com or is that just the verb for “getting online maps” or noun for “directions”?

Whenever I hear MapQuest used by someone I always think of it as the synonym. Which makes for an interesting thought experiment.

The MapQuest brand is so good that it is synonymous with directions. MapQuest = Directions. That is huge for a brand to actually replace people’s common vocabulary words with your service or company. Yet how completely useless is that if no one is actually using their service to get maps. What value would Google get when someone says, “Just google it”, then that person goes to Bing to do their search. Xerox is another good example.

Perhaps I’m wrong in my assumptions about how the general population gets online maps.

The Questions

So here are my questions to those of you haven’t cleaned up their RSS feeds in the past year and so I’m still around.

Do you primarily use MapQuest for your online mapping needs?
Do you commonly hear people use “MapQuest” in sentences?
If you hear, “Just MapQuest it”, do you think the person saying it literally means, “Get your maps from mapquest.com”?
What can MapQuest do to start cashing in on the successful brand?