control the gateway to the entire industry online

http://www.domainrich.com/2006/12/generic-branded-domains.php
[[.....]]

Generic and Branded Domain Names in Corporate Marketing

How Brand Thinking Has Enslaved Corporate America on the Internet

We're currently developing a few of our health-related domain names. A colleague of mine in the pharmaceutical industry said she was speaking to a Pharma Company executive about health and medical-related domain names, and his opinion was that a premium health domain name such as Menopause.com should be worth about $10,000 to his company. He didn't understand why it would sell for $2-3 million. At least at his level, his focus was in finding a unique branded name.

I don't disagree that owning a unique brand is important. However, as diplomatically as possible, I told her that her pharma friend was being short-sighted if he truly believed that ownership of generic domain names had such little value.
If he really understood his business as a whole,
he should want to control the gateway to his category on the Internet,
and not simply his own brand.
After all, searching for health information online is one of the things consumers do most.

Without ownership of that gateway, these companies will be giving funneling money to the premium health domain owners for the rest of their lives.

At a recent Domain conference, a panel of Madison Avenue ad agency and marketing executives held a discussion about why major corporations had failed to register the generic keyword domain names that define their industries.
In the November edition of DNJournal,
Ron Jackson reports about this panel discussion at the TRAFFIC East/Moniker domain name conference:

"Domain owners need to do everything they can to educate corporate
leaders...

"How is it that Hilton and Marriott and Westin and all of the
rest couldn't
figure out how many leads they would get from a domain like
hotels.com? Instead
of paying a million or two for a domain they now have to
pay tens of millions
(for leads) for the rest of their
lives."

"Corporations have been trained to
think in terms of "brands" for
200 years now. They view their brand as something
with qualities that set it
apart from generics, in fact they view brands as the
exact opposite of a
generic term."

"What we think they fail to understand is
that a generic
domain name reaches the consumer when they are thinking about
buying
something in a category, like an automobile, before they zero in on
brands.
Owning the generic domains, like Cars.com, could effectively make them
the
gatekeeper for the entire industry, allowing them to intercept the customer
and send them to the brand they want before they go to a competitor

[[.....]]