Rakuten has a bizarre corporate branding strategy. In 2010, Rakuten bought buy.com. No bit deal there. Companies buy other companies all the time.
But, then it did something truly strange. It rebranded buy.com to rakuten.com and in the process destroyed both a 3-letter .com domain name, and eventually, caused itself to spend millions of dollars on TV commercials showing people on the street earning money for being able to say the name right.
No Buy.com
So, where millions of Americans might have blundered into buy.com, or even gone there on purpose, pretty much nobody goes to rakuten.com unless they already know about it, which is sort of the opposite of branding.
Contrast this to Amazon who has bought up 100s of online retailers and left them completely alone to flourish based on their existing customer base and established branding. As an added bonus anytime someone wants to comparison shop the “competition” of Amazon, they often end up buying from an Amazon property anyway.
Bought from diapers.com or zappos.com? You bought from Amazon.
There Is No Ebates, Only Rakuten
The “Big Fat Check,” I get every quarter from Ebates has always said, “Ebates – A Rakuten Company” in the upper-left corner, but apparently that doesn’t satisfy Rakuten’s corporate vanity branding strategy well enough. So, according to this recent check
Big news:
We’re changing our name to Rakuten.
Is Rakuten Legit and Worth It?
So, there you go. After the thousands of marketing hours, and countless millions of dollars building up the Ebates brand and ebates.com website, Rakuten is flushing it all down the toilet in the hopes that millions of American who know about Ebates, and the thousands that use Ebates will instead somehow remember a foreign sounding word that they have to pay people to pronounce right.
It’s a strange corporate strategy when your name means more to you than your business.
I suppose “Good luck,” is in order.