Can You Rebuild Your Brand with a Generic Name?

posted on 01 Oct 2007 by Calvin Ayre.

generic domain name

In response to what Elliot J. Silver had to say in his blog post, "Branding vs. Generic Brand Names"...

Elliot brings up some very good points. With regards to our current situation involving the Patent Trolls over at 1st Tech, Elliot writes: "When the brand was threatened recently, Bodog changed their domain name from Bodog.com to NewBodog.com and then finally to BodogLife.com. Although the domain name changed, the brand and messaging remained constant".

That is true…our brand has not changed; the Bodog brand stands true and tall. However, I don't agree with his thinking that a brand cannot rebuild itself when its domain name is generic.

The Bodog brand was enhanced by this Patent Troll attack on our domains; it was not harmed in any way. Traffic has jumped since the attack on our domains and our extremely fast and decisive victory—combined with our style in doing it—are in fact brand building and message distributing at the same time. The Bodog brand is now stronger than it was before! There is no doubt in anyone's mind what Bodog stands for!

Can we do more for our customers and achieve greater success with a more generic domain name? No. With everything that Bodog has been doing these days our domain would have to be 10 words long to accommodate all of our services. The Bodog name stands up to everything that we do.

We have proven before that we are able to take an arbitrarily named domain like Bodog and rank it number one for tons of keywords, and since we have the same team working on this for Bodoglife.com as we did for "Bodog Classic", there is no reason why we will not regain our position in all relevant keywords over the next few months. In fact, when we do get our original domain name back we will likely use it as a redirect. Bodoglife.com works just fine, thank you very much.