When the Brand Became the Blindfold

Your columnist will diverge today from his usual praises of marketing and will attempt to explain a time where even the grandest of marketings did not stop a giant from being toppled. Today, your columnist’s organisation uses a mixture of Teams and Zoom and, the occasional, Google Meet or WhatsApp calls for the more spontaneous meeting. However, as many readers will remember and many young adults will likely not, before these platforms, there was the monolith of the video-conferencing industry: Skype.

Skype reached the height of brand recall, that many of the tech brands have looked towards with envy. This height is identified by when the brand name enters the vocabulary of the user as a verb, the name of the brand becoming synonymous with the functionality that it provides. One can find examples of this in ‘googling’ something, or ‘Instagramming’ a picture of one’s wildlife adventures. In the pre pandemic era, your columnist would often find himself ‘Skyping’ family members who had stationed themselves out of country, or ‘Skyping’ old friends from college. Skype was a medium through which one could see the faces of old hometown friends live, instead of in the pictures that one would send across to each other.

And yet, when the pandemic arrived and the world was compelled to conduct its professional life from spare bedrooms and kitchen tables, it was not Skype that became the verb of the moment. It was Zoom. The shift did not require a campaign, a rebrand, or a price war. It happened through the accumulation of small frictions that Skype had long stopped noticing. Zoom offered a meeting link that required no account, no download prompt, no moment of confusion at the threshold. Microsoft Teams, meanwhile, arrived already embedded in the corporate stack, pre-installed and waiting. Skype, for all its brand equity, had not kept pace with how users were actually behaving. They had moved on, and Skype had not followed them.

This is the lesson that Zoom and Teams taught, less through genius and more through attentiveness. They understood that the working professional did not want to manage a platform; he wanted to join a call. The layout, the one-click link, the reliability of the audio, the waiting room, the raised-hand feature during large calls, these were not engineering novelties so much as responses to observed behaviour. Bain & Company, a consultancy, has noted in its research on customer loyalty that the single greatest driver of switching is accumulated friction, not a competitor's superiority on any single dimension. The consumer rarely announces his dissatisfaction. They simply, one day, do not return.

This is where marketing, in your columnist's assessment, must hold itself to a higher standard than it typically does. Brand awareness is not a moat. It is, at best, a head start. The mistake that organisations make is to interpret the silence of their users as endorsement. A customer who has not complained has not necessarily not suffered. Skype had hundreds of millions of registered accounts at its peak, figures that would have made any marketing dashboard glow. What those figures could not tell you was how many of those accounts were being used out of habit rather than preference and how thin the line between the two had become. Marketing must be far more forensic in its approach: where are users spending time that they are not spending with us, what are competitors offering that we have decided is unnecessary and what has the product team last changed that a user actually asked for.

The brand name becoming a verb is the moment to be most vigilant. The verb endures long after the product has been surpassed, which means the organisation can continue to feel relevant while becoming less so. Skype was available till May of 2025. The name still surfaces in memory. But the meeting, as they say, has moved on.