Downside of Using Generic Keyword for Branding

There are quite a few successful brands that simply use a dictionary word for branding. When a company builds its brand around a popular keyword, I always recommend getting the brand match .com domain name. The downside to branding on a generic term, especially when the brand match .com domain name is not owned by the company, is the potential for confusion.

I want to illustrate this with a pair of TechCrunch tweets from today and yesterday. The tweets link to articles about companies that use the generic term “Frame” in their branding and announced that they raised outside capital:

Neither company owns Frame.com, which is owned by custom picture framing company.

You will note that the TechCrunch article yesterday is about a company called Frame, which uses TryFrame.com for its website. Today’s article is about a company called Frame AI, which uses the Frame.AI domain name, so that branding is a bit better.

I like generic one word .com domain names and think they can make strong brand names. The downside is when there are many brands with very similar names.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

1 COMMENT

  1. I personally would never use generic one word to name a company because that can be confusing. Example are User.com, Name.com, Escrow.com, etc. By using such words as company names, they have to mention “.com” as well when mentioning their companies otherwise they can easily confuse their audience. In fact, I don’t regard those text as brands because they are actually domain names.

    In my opinion, the best choices for naming a company is using two to three words or made-up names. That’s what strong companies in the worlds use for their brands.

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