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Comment by godzillabrennus | Hacker News Reader

One theory I'll toss out about these failures is that it's a people problem. They probably have marketing people leading them, hence why they bought such a "great brand". Turning revenue doesn't mean making a profit and without enough focus on tech automating as much as possible the businesses don't survive.

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As a 'marketing person' I have to starkly disagree with this theory. No marketing person worth their weight in salt thinks that a generic TLD is a "great brand". Branding is quite specifically a matter of owning mindshare with a unique name or mark that can be easily recalled at a point in a buyer's journey.

Let's not go belittling people because it's not your area of expertise. Plenty of great businesses lead by branding people that don't focus on tech-automation end up succeeding. There is more than one path to success.

Also I suggest you check out the 11 immutable laws of branding by Al Ries, it's basically a branding bible and a short and easy read! Maybe you'll find a few tidbits of use from those 'marketing people' :)

Generic words are not brands. I have no feelings about shoes.com nor can I ever other than I like shoes. I care about certain brand of shoes because they look nice and last a while, i.e. quality. That's why companies fight to keep their brands from becoming generic names.

Indeed, it's a shame that that company Microsoft (remember them? They made a BASIC interpreter for CP/M) chose useless names like Windows and Word.

The string, be it Google (nonsense word, to most people), Windows (generic word), or Apple (real word out of context) is all about what you do with it.

Surely this is less common now, but I can remember at one point it was a pretty common behavior to say, "hm, I want some information at shoes" and just try navigating to shoes.com. Probably this became less common because porn advertisers caught on and started redirecting to porn.

Certainly it was expected that that style of navigation would be extremely lucrative. It never turned out that way of course. In large aggregate domain squatters have made some real money over the last 20 years by owning various direct type domains (like weddingshoes.com).

I remember in the mid & late 1990s, during the insane dotcom landgrab, people really believed having that special domain name was everything. At the time, it coincided with people thinking they could build a business overnight and IPO the next week, so having something like Shoes.com to sell to naive investors was crucial. I remember one guy pitching the premise, on CNBC and elsewhere, that he had acquired all the buything.com domains, like buysocks.com, and he was going to build a retailing juggernaut on the back of that.

Easy-to-remember domain names are still good. People make a lot of money parking domains and you would expect that to be impossible if they were worthless.

For most businesses marketing is far more important than technology.

pets.com

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com

Petsovernight.com. Delivering little bundles of love, in a box, directly to your door.

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