Subscribe to RSSOverstock vs. O
Mashable recently published a piece on how O.com (formerly Overstock.com) was changing its name back to Overstock.com. Good move in my opinion – just looking at traffic to both web addresses, it is easy to see that the kind-of-cool-but-a-bit-strange URL www.o.com wasn’t getting the attention of consumers.
For review, here’s Overstock.com’s traffic over the past two years:
As you can see, the chart has been relatively stable during the past two years with peak traffic of around 22m people visiting the website and an average around 14m.
In contrast, O.com, has barely registered above 130,000 unique visitors. So while they thought they were making a brand change, the general public basically ignored the change.
Overstock joins Netflix in trying to make a branding change without really thinking about how consumers would react.
UPDATE: A reader has brought to our attention that we had incorrectly tracked O.com instead of O.co. Interestingly enough, although O.co was the correct alternative site for Overstock.com, it has received even less traffic than O.com, a nonexistent website.
What do you think of the change back to the old branding? Smart? Obvious? Let us know!
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Damian Roskill is the Managing Director of Marketing at Compete. Before Compete Damian was head of products for a video start-up and has worked in start-ups for most of his career. Damian's career aspiration is to be at one with the advertising universe. Damian can be found on Twitter as Droskill, or connect with him on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/droskill |
4 Comments
I think / thought it was o.co vs. o.com vs. overstock.com
Right on Steven – made correction above.
This falls into completely obvious category. They’ve spent how many years building up the overstock.com brand name? And they wanted to dump it and start from scratch? Are they crazy?
Overstock’s easy to remember. O? What does that stand for, Oprah?
I want to say there is a correct way to change a large brand name. I recall waching the meida blitz Federal Express did to tell the public it was nowFedEx . They even said “We hope you like it” I know they did a great job when I can recall there quote from 1994. I understand that Internet marketing was not around when it happened however I got the MSG unlike Overstock or Netflicks that I was unawhere of until reading this. Here is some info on why the FedEx branding change worked
http://www.cdf.org/issue_journal/why_federal_express_became_fedex.html
I agree with S.C.J when thinking of branding just “O” I think of Oprah not overstock.com