Seems to be much more of a US thing. As a European I'd use the category name for most of those.

Some of the category names don't even match up - adhesive tape is definitely not what comes to mind for Durex for me.

The specific brands are usually country- or region-specific. It's just that you often don't notice the ones that have been genericized in your culture.

Consider: thermos, escalator, linoleum, trampoline, zipper, scotch (as in tape), jeep, xerox, jacuzzi, dictaphone...

>The specific brands are usually country- or region-specific. It's just that you often don't notice the ones that have been genericized in your culture

I think branding to generic really depends on linguistics of target market, brand writers and brand saturation in target market.

A brand name that is hard to pronounce is less likely to be used and how often do you think about the Slovakian pronunciation of your brand?

The US being a large linguistically similar market would be more susceptible to this.

I don't think any of those exist in my country. We do have some older people that call every PND a 'TomTom'.