Donuts and CentralNic changed their names. Who made the better rebrand?
CentralNic (AIM: TIG) recently changed its brand to Team Internet Group, marking a big change for the large domain name and online advertising firm. It follows another major rebrand in the domain industry when Donuts renamed itself Identity Digital about a year ago.
I’m curious about which rebrand people like the most, so I put together a quick poll. I purposefully left off “I hate them both”. But if you like or hate them both the same, you may choose the third option.
Note: the polling system I used for this post doesn’t seem to work on Safari and some mobile browsers. I’ll fix that next time around. Sorry.
Looking in from outside of the domain space, “Identity Digital” is very confusing.
I imagine the logic behind it is that domains are the face of your digital identity, but “Identity” / “Identity Management” is a pretty big facet of cybersecurity .
Not that “Donuts” made much sense either.
Donuts does not have to make sense, which is why it is (was?) a strong trademark. Think Apple for computers, Delta for airlines, and Chrome for web browsers. All are actual words, but not remotely associated with the underlying products/services. Those trademarks are called arbitrary, and are generally the second strongest type. The strongest are fanciful ones, which are made up words. Examples include Kodak for film, Xerox for photocopiers, and yes, Twitter for social media (and rebranding to X was just moronic from a trademark perspective alone).
Donuts, only because the Donuts brand was so horrible
Neither of them IMO
Both were waste of shareholder money. B2B rebranding is a tool seldom required, and neither qualifies IMHO.
In my opinion, Donuts as a not-very-professional-sounding and a plural word constituted more needs for a rebrand. Identity Digital sounds professional, but it’s not phonetically fluent and 7 syllables is a bit too many. I would say the new brand name is acceptable.
I’m not sure what CentralNic exactly means, but I think it sounds tech-savvy and fits for a tech company. And it being a 3-syllable word is succinctly good. Therefore, I’m curious why they wanted to rebrand. Team Internet is phonetically fluent and okay, though it is not more tech-sounding to me than CentralNic is.
Overall, I like Donuts’ rebrand a little bit more.