Personally, I don't think "rakuten" is any wierder than Toyota or Nissan. It might take some time getting used to but rakuten is a name that has branding potential, what is "buy"? For a similar analogy, try imagining a company that sells computers calling itself computer. I think we'd all agree a rebranding would probably be in order.
You are absolutely correct. I still have no idea what buy.com is because its generic.
In general rebranding is a bad idea because once someone has a perception of the brand its hard to change their mind. Using a brandable term in this case will at least let them start over...but with all the traffic from buy.com
Personally, I don't think "rakuten" is any wierder than Toyota or Nissan.
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.
Toyota and Nissan took so long because of anti-Japanese racism left over from the war, shortly followed by anti-Japanese racism over American insecurity about Japan's growing economic power. Since that stopped being a thing, there's been zero resistance to East Asian brands.
I strongly disagree. Rakuten is foreign and strange to most customers, while Buy's commonality as a term brings with it a sense of trust and familiarity.
>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.
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.
I second this, when you are ambitious to build a global brand this makes totally sense. A generic domain can be a liability, because it's almost impossible to make advertising for "buy". Isn't there Best Buy?
Brand strategy is very interesting and complicated, Quickster was a bold attempt to boost the streaming platform.
I totally agree. We sell jewelry on Buy.com (among other places), and I saw the CEO speak at a conference we were invited to. He's a pretty visionary guy and I wouldnt bet against him.
I wouldn't call them crazy. Rakuten is a Japanese brand that bought Buy.com. I believe they're just consolidating. Is it an unmemorable, weird name? Yeah, but it isn't like someone sat in a room and said "You know what I think? I think Rakuten would sound much better than Buy."
Bad ideas and poor execution happen a lot, but this was a planned move that has some meaning behind it.
Can you find one brand using a generic and relevant to the category name dominate a category? Branding is not just a go with your gut instinct...it is a science that analyzes all the Kleenex, xerox, and googles of the world, the categories that are owned by brands and figures out what works...
Generic brands like apple and amazon are not relevant generic terms to their category so it can be associated in the mind with that category.
(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)
No, it's because because "facebook" has never been used as a common noun to describe social networks - as in, "I'll go log onto the facebook," referring to MySpace or LiveJournal or something. This conversation is about businesses which are named after the field they are in. (The equivalent is if Facebook were named "Social Network.")
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.
They completely dominated the space that the traditional facebook was in though, that's what they started out as. Obviously they've grown to encompass a much wider space since then.
Buy.com is no more generic than American Airlines or Deutsche Bank, or Sky, or Claro.
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
None of those brands own a category!!! You can make money with any name if you put enough money behind it...branding is about owning a category in peoples minds to the point of them saying, "pass me a Kleenex, or just Google it, or make a xerox."
I'm sorry, but I remain utterly convinced that Coca Cola and Microsoft will come closer to ever owning a category than "that Amazon clone with the funny Japanese name they devote large amounts of homepage real estate to explaining", FedEx is definitely a verb, and the others all appear in "top brands" lists compiled by the people who make a fortune in branding.
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.
Diapers.com, Ancestry.com and 1-800-CONTACTS come to mind. Hotels.com, Staples.com, Drugstore.com and Overstock.com may be close. Some like Pets.com obviously didn't work out.
Update: stamps.com and audible.com are also good examples.
See my comment below... branding is about owning a category...you can still make money with a generic name but it will never replace the category name.
I don't care about your comment below, in the one that I replied to you asked, "Can you find one brand using a generic and relevant to the category name dominate a category". I could and I did.
all three of these brands are brandable. I don't think you understand the objective of branding if you think no true scotsman applies here.
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.
I have no idea what those brands stand for...I don't associate them with anything other than something probably related to the word... when I think I need a hotel I don't think go to hotels.com I think go to price line or kayak.
branding is much more than just being associated with a category. It is about how people perceive your brand. I cannot tell you anything about those brands other than they do something related to that category...
Here is a good contrast, "I associate Southwest Airlines with Cheap, No Frills Flights." I don't know anything about those brands... the name doesn't tell me anything about WHY I SHOULD BUY FROM THEM.
Given that Kleenex is just "Clean-X" and Xerox is just "Xero(graphy)-X" (they were known as Haloid before commercializing xerography and rebranding), those two names are actually just an "X" away from being generic.
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?!]
What this article doesn't mention is that Rakuten is the #7 site in Japan and one of the top 100 sites in the world. They bought buy.com and are consolidating brands. Although the name "Rakuten" isn't well-known to people in the U.S., given the brand they've built up in Japan, it's a perfectly rational decision to choose "Rakuten" as the umbrella name. It would be like eBay buying "auctions.com".
Let's picture a similar situation 20 years ago: I own the domain "books.com" but my company is called Amazon. I own the domain "movies.com", but I choose to name my company Netflix.
Does it bother anyone else that Inc got the story wrong? I thought they were supposed to be somewhat journalistic .It took me < 30 sec on the site to find out that Buy.com had been bought by the Rakuten group. The post author is suggesting that Buy.com simply decided to change their name -- instead their owners want to slap their own name on it. Maybe silly, but not crazy.
The problem with Buy.com is that "buy" is a word (or call to action), not a brand. I've probably seen the buy.com URL around here or there, but the word is so pedestrian, it doesn't ring any bells.
This. I have never been to buy.com, but it kind of reminds me of that asking site with the red dot logo and ads plastered all over it. What's its name again?
Calling out Rakuten for "meaning nothing to most people" is kind of silly. What about Pepsi then?
I imagine that most of Buy.com's traffic is driven by the parent company's affiliate network, Rakuten LinkShare. Buy.com is prominently advertised throughout the backend interface and it's clear that you should be pushing Buy.com as an affiliate.
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.
I used to buy from buy.com often, back during the dot com bubble. They were pretty big then, and they had pretty decent deals. Then mid-2000's Amazon stepped it up with their free shipping and lower prices, and basically buried buy.com.
I'm curious about why Rakuten would even want Buy.com... I've never heard of buy.com before, they seem like a spammy, domain-squatting type site. I'm guessing what happened is Rakuten picked them up for their existing backend infrastructure and staff, and they're going to make the front-end a more North American version of their existing Japanese site. Their current 'global' site is pretty disappointing, mostly just focused on Japanese-made exports, where the Japanese one sells damn near everything (including food).
I never heard of rakuten until last week when I saw their CEO is keynoting at this years IRCE show. I even made a mental note to Google him later this week. now I dont need to.
I am sure the site has lots of traffic and I'm sure the domain has lots of market liquidity, so its a real income producing asset.
Buy.com is not generally associated with quality merchandise. A rebranding makes sense if the enterprise is will be repositioned as something other than Big Lots on the internet.
> Why would you want to position away from a URL name that has a universal, positive meaning and replace it with something that means nothing to almost everyone.
for the record, "buy" does not universally have a positive meaning. i am sick of buying stuff.
Rakuten also bought Play.com, the UK store selling video games, DVDs and music. Whilst Rakuten is now pushed pretty heavily on the site, the URL is still Play.com and the Play.com branding remains.
Curious as to why they wouldn't/aren't do(ing) the same for Buy.com?
Technically, play.com isn't actually a UK store - they're based in Jersey which isn't part of the UK and isn't subject to UK or EU consumer protection laws.
Rakuten seems to be buying many online retailers recently. They've also bought Priceminister in France. Renaming buy.com, and maybe later Priceminister, might be part of an effort to unify all these online retailers under one recognizable name.
Just some anecdotal evidence to confirm the OP. One of my e-mail aliases, apparently the one I had set up for Buy.com (I did not pause to check), started receiving e-mails from this "Rakuten." I blacklisted the sender instantly.
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.
Something to think about - Rakuten means optimism in Japan, but it's an opportunity to build a brand everywhere else. The Rakuten brand is a "empty glass" which means the company can brand itself in any way it wants.
"This rebrand is so crazy that I have to assume that somebody inside the company has gone insane."
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.
Actually, considering that Rakuten is really trying to expand internationally, it is a really bold move to change the official language to get employees to look a bit over the horizon.
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.
The interesting part is that so many HN readers appear to be too young to remember Buy.com as a brand. That, to me, says more about their inability to market themselves than the value of the brand, which was quite strong back in the day.
I must say I've never met anyone that uses "skrill" as slang for money, and if I did I probably wouldn't trust them to look after it. Similarly, Moolah is 4x faster to say and type than Bank of America but I don't see the rebrand happening any time soon.
Japan already has Rakuten.co.jp, which is a parent company of Rakuten.com.
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)
Weird. They spent so long working on the buy.com brand, and now they've chosen a new name - harder to remember, harder to type in. The meaning behind Rakuten, 'optimism', doesn't really fit what they do either. I'd love to know who decided to rebrand buy.com to this, and why.
Buy.com is such a generic name, it's hard to associate any kind of unique brand to it. Rakuten is only 7 letters long and is associated with a meaning? Yeah!
my first thought after reading this was couldn't the author not do some background research into the freaking marketing plan behind this or what the ad agency working on promotions was thinking....or like others have mentioned, the corporate merger history.
'Journalists'. geezus.
inc.com should not talk about "dumb" i just tried to read the article on a mobile device. it was the worst possible ux experience i ever had, even worse than your standard swipeware.
