
World's Dumbest Rebrand? - yesplorer
http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/worlds-dumbest-rebrand.html
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jfaucett
Personally, I don't think "rakuten" is any wierder than Toyota or Nissan. It
might take some time getting used to but rakuten is a name that has branding
potential, what is "buy"? For a similar analogy, try imagining a company that
sells computers calling itself computer. I think we'd all agree a rebranding
would probably be in order.

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Lagged2Death
_Personally, I don't think "rakuten" is any wierder than Toyota or Nissan._

Perhaps, but it's worth noting that Toyota and Nissan took something like
20-30 years of persistence to gain respect and success in the American
marketplace.

 _what is "buy"?_

 _noun_ a bargain: _The couch was a real buy._

I think "buy.com" wasn't a particularly good name, but even without ever
having any dealings with buy.com, I could guess that it was a discounter of
some sort.

It's doubtful I'll remember the name "Rakuten" or the way its spelled.

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philwelch
Toyota and Nissan took so long because of anti-Japanese racism left over from
the war, shortly followed by anti-Japanese racism over American insecurity
about Japan's growing economic power. Since that stopped being a thing,
there's been zero resistance to East Asian brands.

~~~
w1ntermute
Anti-Asian racism is still pervasive in the US. Toyota and Nissan continue to
succeed _despite_ their names.

~~~
philwelch
Just like Samsung, Honda, Hyundai, Sony, Mitsubishi, Hitachi.... It doesn't
appear that Asian brands really suffer at all.

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Posibyte
I wouldn't call them crazy. Rakuten is a Japanese brand that bought Buy.com. I
believe they're just consolidating. Is it an unmemorable, weird name? Yeah,
but it isn't like someone sat in a room and said "You know what I think? I
think Rakuten would sound much better than Buy."

Bad ideas and poor execution happen a lot, but this was a planned move that
has some meaning behind it.

~~~
davemel37
Can you find one brand using a generic and relevant to the category name
dominate a category? Branding is not just a go with your gut instinct...it is
a science that analyzes all the Kleenex, xerox, and googles of the world, the
categories that are owned by brands and figures out what works... Generic
brands like apple and amazon are not relevant generic terms to their category
so it can be associated in the mind with that category.

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jonknee
Diapers.com, Ancestry.com and 1-800-CONTACTS come to mind. Hotels.com,
Staples.com, Drugstore.com and Overstock.com may be close. Some like Pets.com
obviously didn't work out.

Update: stamps.com and audible.com are also good examples.

~~~
davemel37
See my comment below... branding is about owning a category...you can still
make money with a generic name but it will never replace the category name.

~~~
jonknee
I don't care about your comment below, in the one that I replied to you asked,
"Can you find one brand using a generic and relevant to the category name
dominate a category". I could and I did.

~~~
davemel37
none of those brands own a category in my mind. They are successful for other
reasons... Despite their names, not because of them.

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overcyn
This is just a No True Scotsman argument. You've been given at least a dozen
examples but none of them are "dominating" enough for you.

Blogger, Dropbox, XVideos.

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davemel37
all three of these brands are brandable. I don't think you understand the
objective of branding if you think no true scotsman applies here.

Branding is the battle for peoples perceptions, and follows the rules of how
our minds perceive things. Your mind is not capable of assigning meaning to a
generic term. You can know what they do, but you cant associate it with a
category. "American Airlines" does not mean an American Airline in anybody's
mind. Just as Buy.com doesn't mean anything other than a website that might
have something to do with the word buy.

Generic domains have all sorts of other value, and you can make lots of money
without a good brand. But... Branding is about one thing only... Associating
your name as the "Go-To" folks in a category. That association is simply not
possible with a generic name.

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overcyn
Why is buy.com a generic domain and therefore unbrandable but blogger.com
brandable?

Both are words in common usage and very relevant to their respective fields.

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brandonb
What this article doesn't mention is that Rakuten is the #7 site in Japan and
one of the top 100 sites in the world. They bought buy.com and are
consolidating brands. Although the name "Rakuten" isn't well-known to people
in the U.S., given the brand they've built up in Japan, it's a perfectly
rational decision to choose "Rakuten" as the umbrella name. It would be like
eBay buying "auctions.com".

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qnk
Let's picture a similar situation 20 years ago: I own the domain "books.com"
but my company is called Amazon. I own the domain "movies.com", but I choose
to name my company Netflix.

Believe me, we'll get used to the Rakuten name.

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ansgri
The funny thing is, books.com --> B&N, but we use Amazon, and for movies.com
we all know IMDB.

Someone owns ask.com, and they say it's a search engine, but I can't overcome
the feeling that they're just spammers, as the name is too generic.

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cedricd
Does it bother anyone else that Inc got the story wrong? I thought they were
supposed to be somewhat journalistic .It took me < 30 sec on the site to find
out that Buy.com had been bought by the Rakuten group. The post author is
suggesting that Buy.com simply decided to change their name -- instead their
owners want to slap their own name on it. Maybe silly, but not crazy.

~~~
Terretta
I got the story right in this HN submission two weeks ago by simply linking to
Rakuten's About page:

"Buy.com renamed Rakuten Shopping: brilliant branding or massive mistake?"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5176774> ->
<http://www.rakuten.com/ct/aboutus.aspx>

As for the "journalist's" editorial, I was able to cover that in the
submission title. Not much value add in this Inc article.

The rename did get me to give buy.com a new try.

I found something I couldn't find on Amazon there, and spent $300 on it. And
two weeks later, I do remember the name. So, going with "brilliant".

~~~
lancewiggs
Moreover Inc pops up spammy surveys and other elements. It was the second Inc
link from HN today, and I'll now be trying to avoid them in the future.

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nhebb
The problem with Buy.com is that "buy" is a word (or call to action), not a
brand. I've probably seen the buy.com URL around here or there, but the word
is so pedestrian, it doesn't ring any bells.

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dakimov
But "buy.com" is a brand, and extremely valuable both as a brand and as a
domain.

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sbarre
I shop online all the time, I've never been to buy.com

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dickbasedregex
Ditto. I always figured buy.com a site that snapped up the domain in the early
days and either was just a shopping portal, reseller or affiliate site.

Maybe this was due to poor marketing on Buy.com's part?

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tuananh
I get the same feeling; probably just because 'buy' is just a too generic
term.

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alanctgardner2
I'm curious about why Rakuten would even want Buy.com... I've never heard of
buy.com before, they seem like a spammy, domain-squatting type site. I'm
guessing what happened is Rakuten picked them up for their existing backend
infrastructure and staff, and they're going to make the front-end a more North
American version of their existing Japanese site. Their current 'global' site
is pretty disappointing, mostly just focused on Japanese-made exports, where
the Japanese one sells damn near everything (including food).

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davemel37
I never heard of rakuten until last week when I saw their CEO is keynoting at
this years IRCE show. I even made a mental note to Google him later this week.
now I dont need to. I am sure the site has lots of traffic and I'm sure the
domain has lots of market liquidity, so its a real income producing asset.

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brudgers
Buy.com is not generally associated with quality merchandise. A rebranding
makes sense if the enterprise is will be repositioned as something other than
Big Lots on the internet.

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exit
_> Why would you want to position away from a URL name that has a universal,
positive meaning and replace it with something that means nothing to almost
everyone._

for the record, "buy" does not universally have a positive meaning. i am sick
of buying stuff.

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iamben
Rakuten also bought Play.com, the UK store selling video games, DVDs and
music. Whilst Rakuten is now pushed pretty heavily on the site, the URL is
still Play.com and the Play.com branding remains.

Curious as to why they wouldn't/aren't do(ing) the same for Buy.com?

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makomk
Technically, play.com isn't actually a UK store - they're based in Jersey
which isn't part of the UK and isn't subject to UK or EU consumer protection
laws.

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iamben
Sure, it is based in Jersey - but for as long as I can remember (10+ years?)
the site has been aimed at UK shoppers.

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stickydink
It's definitely aimed at the UK, but what they also offer free shipping to
almost anywhere in Western Europe.

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laurent123456
Rakuten seems to be buying many online retailers recently. They've also bought
Priceminister in France. Renaming buy.com, and maybe later Priceminister,
might be part of an effort to unify all these online retailers under one
recognizable name.

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rparet
...or it's rebranding to match the name of its parent company, Japanese-based
Rakuten. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakuten>

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bhauer
Just some anecdotal evidence to confirm the OP. One of my e-mail aliases,
apparently the one I had set up for Buy.com (I did not pause to check),
started receiving e-mails from this "Rakuten." I blacklisted the sender
instantly.

The new name is abysmal.

Buy.com was already the shady back-alley version of Amazon, a domain I
ventured into only when the price offered was notably better than its more
above-board cousin. I don't mean to say Buy is a nefarious company, but rather
my own admittedly ill-conceived notion of Buy was not (and is not) good. For
all I know, they are a completely honest operation.

But with the new new name, I just instinctively and instantly turned off
communication with the firm. Call it what you will, but an Asian-sounding name
nudges the needle too far toward the greatest source of spam my aliases see. I
have been trained by history. And my blacklist trigger finger is ready.

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vacri
The rebranding of 'Farnell' to 'element 14' was far dumber than this.

~~~
nwh
Why not just call yourself 'carbon' and be done with it?

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lukethomas
Something to think about - Rakuten means optimism in Japan, but it's an
opportunity to build a brand everywhere else. The Rakuten brand is a "empty
glass" which means the company can brand itself in any way it wants.

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arbuge
"This rebrand is so crazy that I have to assume that somebody inside the
company has gone insane."

It gets weirder. The CEO of the company (a man I respect alot) is Japanese but
switched the company's "official language" to English and insisted that all
his Japanese employees learn English.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7olItNyBfo>

Apparently the policy doesn't extend to domain names.

~~~
LeonidasXIV
Actually, considering that Rakuten is really trying to expand internationally,
it is a really bold move to change the official language to get employees to
look a bit over the horizon.

Have you ever used the original japanese Rakuten site? It is incredibly awful,
just like many other japanese sites, because in Japan the focus is on
different things. But if you try to expand with this mentality to the west,
you are going to fail and people will laugh at your crappy attempts.

So actually, I think this move is incredibly smart.

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damoncali
The interesting part is that so many HN readers appear to be too young to
remember Buy.com as a brand. That, to me, says more about their inability to
market themselves than the value of the brand, which was quite strong back in
the day.

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hackerboos
Another dumbest rebrand that comes to mind is Moneybookers rebranding to
Skrill.

~~~
anandkulkarni
Except that Skrill is 4x faster to say, is far shorter to type in, and is
slang for "money".

~~~
notahacker
I must say I've never met anyone that uses "skrill" as slang for money, and if
I did I probably wouldn't trust them to look after it. Similarly, Moolah is 4x
faster to say and type than Bank of America but I don't see the rebrand
happening any time soon.

~~~
czr80
Honestly, I would pay money to see BoA rebrand to Moolah.com

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wyuenho
This might have to do with Rakuten bought buy.com in 2010[1] and is now
bringing their property under the same name.

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakuten.com>

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kmfrk
"Buy" would be "Bai" in Japanese. It depends entirely on the audience and the
brand.

Maybe it'll be marketed as Rakuten in Japan and Buy.com in the West?

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seanmcdirmid
Or in Chinese, bai could mean white or hundred.

Rakuten sounds like Rasputin, a good Russian brand?

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dutchbrit
Weird. They spent so long working on the buy.com brand, and now they've chosen
a new name - harder to remember, harder to type in. The meaning behind
Rakuten, 'optimism', doesn't really fit what they do either. I'd love to know
who decided to rebrand buy.com to this, and why.

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Sayter
Rakuten was chosen because that's the company that purchased buy.com in 2010.
They're basically the Amazon of Japan.

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blisterpeanuts
It's easier for English speakers to remember buy.com than rakuten (or whatever
their name is).

It's weird to go to buy.com and see a different name plastered all over the
screen.

They have a right to call their business whatever they like, but for God's
sake, why throw away a perfectly good brand?

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sunwooz
Buy.com is such a generic name, it's hard to associate any kind of unique
brand to it. Rakuten is only 7 letters long and is associated with a meaning?
Yeah!

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amorphid
It isn't that dumb from my perspective. I've never purchased anything from
Buy.com. Now that I've heard of Rakuten, I will at least check it out.

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cool-RR
Fun fact: The name Rakuten sounds similar to the name of a medication against
acne used by teenagers in Israel.

~~~
jamesdelaneyie
Roaccutane? I used it in my teens here in Ireland.

~~~
philwelch
In America we just call it Accutane. It's the one with all the terrible side
effects, right?

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ChrisArchitect
my first thought after reading this was couldn't the author not do some
background research into the freaking marketing plan behind this or what the
ad agency working on promotions was thinking....or like others have mentioned,
the corporate merger history. 'Journalists'. geezus.

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rachelbythebay
My favorite was "USAir" to "US Airways".

Soon, it too will be moot.

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microtherion
Maybe they’re rewriting the site infrastructure in Rakudo at the same time…

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franze
inc.com should not talk about "dumb" i just tried to read the article on a
mobile device. it was the worst possible ux experience i ever had, even worse
than your standard swipeware.

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shelf
same logic as hello.com

