Company to nix the Play.com brand in favor of Rakuten.co.uk.
Japanese ecommerce company Rakuten is doing something rather unusual: it is dropping the use of great, generic domain names in favor of its own brand Rakuten.
Last year the company dropped the Buy.com brand from the company of the same name it bought in 2010, forwarding the domain name to Rakuten.com instead.
Now it is preparing to drop the Play.com brand from the UK e-commerce company it acquired in 2011. Play.com will soon forward to Rakuten.com instead.
People called the Buy.com switch the “World’s Dumbest Rebrand“. My understanding is Play.com is still a popular brand in the UK, so this change is equally as puzzling.
I get that Rakuten wants to “be the brand”, but it’s not exactly a household name in the places where Buy.com and Play.com were popular.
(Thanks @mneylon)
Acro says
Nothing puzzling here. So-called “hyper brandables” are far too generic to be used as brands in markets with large competition. This does not lower the value of generics, simply makes them impractical for use in certain markets.
couponpages says
I agree. It’s a case where they want to guarantee if somebody types Rakuten, they get them… instead of a SERP.
This reminds me of how Roto-Rooter used to run ads saying “Find us in the White Pages”, because they knew if somebody went to the yellow pages under plumbing, there would be competition, but in the white pages, “Roto-Rooter” was unique.
The sad truth is the public is ignorant about how to actually use a browser, so more often than not, they don’t know how to actually enter a domain in the address bar. As such, when they think they are entering an address, they are searching, and Buy is so generic they are opening the door for competitors.
Rakuten.Co.Uk and Rakuten.Com are quite unique, so even if the visitor accidentally searches for it rather than typing into the address box, they are guaranteed to at least be at the top of the results page.
John says
Buy.com and Play.com are strong enough to be considered brands on par with Rakuten.
I disagree with the 2 posts above.
I think they have been brainwashed by how Japanese do their surfing, rarely using a domain name. The rest of the world is not Japanese.
I think it was very dumb.
How many people will misspell Rakuten? Lots I suspect.
couponpages says
They are not selling off Buy.Com, they still point to Rakuten.
I know this sounds strange, but if I had to put a number on it, I’d say at least 75% of the public still doesn’t know how to enter a domain name into a browser.
I do a lot of technical support over the phone. Many of those calls start with me asking people to type something like http://www.TeamViewer.Com into the browser.
1. About 20% of the time, they would ask me what a browser is… Some are brave enough to say “Is that the E?”. I eventually gave up on using technical terms, so I say “Go to the Internet”… Many still launch AOL, but that’s another story.
2. Next, so I can understand their level of competence, I simply ask them to describe what they see after typing http://www.TeamViewer.Com, and more than half the time, it’s a SERP… not the site.
3. If they are actually on the TeamViewer site, I’m home free… but for the rest, it’s an uphill battle to try to teach them to type it into the address bar. Especially since most of them have at least 3 toolbars that look like address bars.
The fact is, this majority of Internet users don’t care about domains, and think their homepage is the official starting place to the web. That’s why so many sites hijack home pages, because the majority of casual surfers just enter into whatever box on that page says search.
Their level of ignorance about the Internet extends way past that. They routinely leave out .com, because they’ve noticed that they get the same results either way, and the search engines take advantage of their ignorance by happily serving up a PAID ad for the exact domain the user typed into the search box… meaning the site ends up paying for an ad click even though the visitor typed the whole domain (into a search box by mistake).
More search engine sleaze… I recently complained to Google because when you typed one of my domain names into Google, the first line on the SERP was an ad for a competitor… which is fine, but the HEADING for the ad was MY DOMAIN in big bold text. Nothing else. Their ad was “PrintableCoupons.Com”, then in the tiny green link at the bottom was their actual domain. So even when you typed my full domain, you risked losing traffic.
Funny story… Google said their ad was within their guidelines, but believe it or not, while they refused to block that guy, they wouldn’t allow me to buy AdWords because they felt I had too many ads on my site, flagging it as an arbitrage. Hello… all coupon sites are nothing but ads. Coupons.Com is nothing but ads for groceries.
After venting all this… in summary, I have seen many sites recently look for unique brands specifically so they are guaranteed to be found regardless of whether you searched for them… or typed the domain into the address bar. In Rakuten’s case, they still own Buy.Com, but it’s super generic.
Joseph Peterson says
If your competitor is using your domain name in AdWords headings, that’s sleazy indeed.
I suppose you could get a trademark for the full domain including “.COM” and then threaten legal action if they continue.
couponpages says
It wasn’t worth fighting over. Google has too much power to pick a fight. They can wipe you out with one keystroke if you piss somebody off. I had plans to sell it, and have other mission critical sites, so I didn’t want to screw with my longstanding positive reputation.
I didn’t even fight for the right to buy AdWords. 99.99999% of the traffic on that domain was direct type-in, so I didn’t want to pay anything for traffic.
It did bug me that Google allows AdWords to not only mention another domain, but in this case the entire title was just my domain.
The public is ignorant… so seeing the exact domain you typed as the first thing in a SERP is definitely something they shouldn’t allow.
Kassey says
Knowing who started Rukuten, I have no doubt in 10 years or so Rukuten will become a global household brand. Its name may be hard to pronounce or remember at first, but consumers will get it. (I still can’t spell out famous brand names of some German auto makers and French fashion labels but I sure know them.)
Acro says
Every market segment is different, but the hyper generics are way too broad to compete effectively. There is no brand stickiness. People remember Coke, IBM, Microsoft, not soda, computers, software.