Brand Marketing

A few days ago, news broke that Elon Musk wanted to proceed with his acquisition of Twitter. Shortly after the news broke, Musk alluded to how Twitter would fit into his plan for “X:”

Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 4, 2022

X is in reference to a company Musk appears intent to build, and it would reside on the X.com domain name he acquired from PayPal in the Summer of 2017. For the last few years, the only thing appearing on X.com is the letter x, but Musk seemingly has much bigger plans for the domain name.

According to a DNW article in November of last year, the Bird.com domain name was sold for an undisclosed price to an undisclosed buyer. At the present time, the domain name is registered at MarkMonitor, and the registrant is DNStination Inc., MarkMonitor’s privacy proxy service.

I went to sign a purchase agreement using a Montblanc pen I received as a gift. Midway through signing my first set of initials, the pen died. I unscrewed the pen to see what type of ink refill I needed to purchased, and conveniently, the ink type and website domain name were clearly listed on the ink cartridge: MontblancRefills.com.

I visited MontblancRefills.com, and the page did not load. A look at the url bar showed the domain name had redirected to another website. It appears I landed on a zero click landing page. I quickly re-checked to make sure I didn’t typo the domain name, and I had not.

A little over a year ago, Hallmark filed a UDRP against the Mahogany.com domain name. Not surprisingly, the domain registrant prevailed in the UDRP and was able to retain the domain name. Though I was expecting to see a finding of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking, the outcome would have been the same.

I just noticed that Mahogany.com is now owned by Hallmark Licensing. Using the Whois History tool at DomainTools, I can see that the domain name appears to have changed hands in August of 2021. Mahogany.com is being used by Hallmark’s Mahogany brand. Prior to the acquisition of the domain name, I believe Hallmark had been using a page within its Hallmark.com website for this brand.

A company called SmartyStreets has rebranded itself as Smarty. Smartly, Smarty was able to acquire the brand match Smarty.com domain name in advance of the launch of its rebrand. Smarty announced the forthcoming rebrand in late 2021, and the company’s website now fully resolves at Smarty.com.

In a blog post announcing the rebrand, the company’s CTO shared one of the biggest reasons for why the company felt it was necessary to shorten its brand name:

It seems like H&M is getting set to launch a new brand called Seam on the brand match Seam.com domain name. The company promises a “new era of fashion.” Jamie Zoch shared his findings on Twitter this morning:

It appears that premium generic domain name https://t.co/nQ8QrQOumr has been acquired. The domain was owned by Cambridge Collaborative, Inc. who was acquired by Altair in 2019. The domain now holds a Coming Soon page. H&M Hennes & Mauritz GBC AB is on Privacy Page & likely buyers

— Jamie Zoch (@DotWeekly) May 20, 2022