Perhaps, but it's worth noting that Toyota and Nissan took something like 20-30 years of persistence to gain respect and success in the American marketplace.

what is "buy"?

noun a bargain: The couch was a real buy.

I think "buy.com" wasn't a particularly good name, but even without ever having any dealings with buy.com, I could guess that it was a discounter of some sort.

It's doubtful I'll remember the name "Rakuten" or the way its spelled.

I had a great uncle who used to get drunk rant about how (this is probably in the early 60s) "Teeyota" was the way of the future. Everybody laughed.

Brand strategy is very interesting and complicated, Quickster was a bold attempt to boost the streaming platform.

Bad ideas and poor execution happen a lot, but this was a planned move that has some meaning behind it.

(I'm getting downvoted because presumably people don't realize Facebook was a common generic term used for the book universities gave to students with photos, etc. of other student to encourage socialization at the start of the year)

Also, I doubt most people have really heard of the concept of a physical facebook. From my understanding, it's limited to Harvard and maybe other schools around there.

There's a huge number of brands that use the [nation] [generic term] format, including many major international banks, airlines, and utility companies many of which totally dominate their domestic market and/or are significant internationally

Even if you're looking at the world's biggest brands and companies, then IBM, GE, GM, FedEx, NBC, BBC and even the likes of Microsoft and Coca-Cola are clearly abbreviations of very generic terms. A significant proportion of the rest are simply people's names. For all the "science" and lack thereof that goes into brand investments, generic names tend to last and "cute" names often turn out to be short-lived gimmicks

And the brand becomes verb thing happens almost accidentally which is why, no matter how much Microsoft's branding team wants us to, nobody ever asks their friends to "just Bing it", whereas everyone "Xeroxes" stuff despite the xerography company in question actively spending to discourage the genericization of its trademark.

Update: stamps.com and audible.com are also good examples.

Blogger, Dropbox, XVideos.

Branding is the battle for peoples perceptions, and follows the rules of how our minds perceive things. Your mind is not capable of assigning meaning to a generic term. You can know what they do, but you cant associate it with a category. "American Airlines" does not mean an American Airline in anybody's mind. Just as Buy.com doesn't mean anything other than a website that might have something to do with the word buy.

Generic domains have all sorts of other value, and you can make lots of money without a good brand. But... Branding is about one thing only... Associating your name as the "Go-To" folks in a category. That association is simply not possible with a generic name.

Both are words in common usage and very relevant to their respective fields.

  - 1-800-FLOWERS
  - 1-800-CONTACTS
  - hotels.com

It seems like those who own generic names are getting too old to be competitive.

Another way of putting that is "unique"—and unique names are very valuable, both classically for establishing identity, but even more so these days: You want google searches for your name to end up on your site, not giving vague "everything on the internet" results.

Of course the real reason here is that Rakuten is an enormous steamroller in Japan (basically: Japan's version of Amazon), and if they're going to consolidate, they're hardly going to change the familiar name that's accompanied their success, especially not for some vague generic term.

[Recently I've happened to read various stories on "inc.com" and they've all been absolutely idiotic. Does anybody actually read this site?!]

Believe me, we'll get used to the Rakuten name.

Someone owns ask.com, and they say it's a search engine, but I can't overcome the feeling that they're just spammers, as the name is too generic.

"Buy.com renamed Rakuten Shopping: brilliant branding or massive mistake?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5176774 -> http://www.rakuten.com/ct/aboutus.aspx

As for the "journalist's" editorial, I was able to cover that in the submission title. Not much value add in this Inc article.

The rename did get me to give buy.com a new try.

I found something I couldn't find on Amazon there, and spent $300 on it. And two weeks later, I do remember the name. So, going with "brilliant".

Calling out Rakuten for "meaning nothing to most people" is kind of silly. What about Pepsi then?

Maybe this was due to poor marketing on Buy.com's part?

This finally explains to me why I've been seeing all the graphics for the Buy.com campaigns change to 'Rakuten Buy.com'. I didn't know that Buy.com is a Rakuten brand. Honestly, I didn't know it was a company outside of Rakuten LinkShare. TIL.

for the record, "buy" does not universally have a positive meaning. i am sick of buying stuff.

Curious as to why they wouldn't/aren't do(ing) the same for Buy.com?

The new name is abysmal.

Buy.com was already the shady back-alley version of Amazon, a domain I ventured into only when the price offered was notably better than its more above-board cousin. I don't mean to say Buy is a nefarious company, but rather my own admittedly ill-conceived notion of Buy was not (and is not) good. For all I know, they are a completely honest operation.

But with the new new name, I just instinctively and instantly turned off communication with the firm. Call it what you will, but an Asian-sounding name nudges the needle too far toward the greatest source of spam my aliases see. I have been trained by history. And my blacklist trigger finger is ready.

It gets weirder. The CEO of the company (a man I respect alot) is Japanese but switched the company's "official language" to English and insisted that all his Japanese employees learn English.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7olItNyBfo

Apparently the policy doesn't extend to domain names.

Have you ever used the original japanese Rakuten site? It is incredibly awful, just like many other japanese sites, because in Japan the focus is on different things. But if you try to expand with this mentality to the west, you are going to fail and people will laugh at your crappy attempts.

So actually, I think this move is incredibly smart.

Was only thinking that changing the domain name to Japanese was weird, especially in view of the aforementioned change to English.

Japanese as an official language makes it impossible to hire almost anyone experienced with large scale e-commerce.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakuten.com

Maybe it'll be marketed as Rakuten in Japan and Buy.com in the West?

I believe they're simply rebranding all of their international chain to match the parent name. AFAIK most of their international store already using the Rakuten brand except in few countries that is a result of a buyout. (Buy.com in US, Play.com in UK, PriceMinister in France and TARAD.com in Thailand)

Rakuten sounds like Rasputin, a good Russian brand?

It's weird to go to buy.com and see a different name plastered all over the screen.

They have a right to call their business whatever they like, but for God's sake, why throw away a perfectly good brand?

Soon, it too will be moot.