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.
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