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Comment by ahmedfromtunis | Hacker News Reader

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ahmedfromtunis·

For a small restaurant, wouldn't it be easier to rebrand but making sure they own the domain first?

I know this is not ideal, but pragmatically speaking, this might be simpler and cheaper.

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Every previously loyal customer would believe the restaurant changed ownership and is no longer a known quantity.

If anything, a rebrand is much harder if you are small. If McDonalds rebranded to a new name that would make national news, and their consistent and well-protected branding and large number of store locations would make it very clear to potential customers that little except the name changed. Small restaurants have non of that

Case in point: the sign outside the fast food establishment might say "Macca's" instead of "McDonald's", but I know little has changed otherwise.

The thing is, even "small" restaurants can have decades worth of history and clients may not recognize a new name. That, combined with German tendency to believe that "the Internet is Neuland" and not care about it, is now proving disastrous.

IMO "not ideal" is still a euphemism. Even if you do this, often throwing away decades of branding, there is a high chance that Lieferando aka Just Eat Takeaway.com will still not only register a similar domain again, but that it will rank higher than your website anyway, even with the "worse" domain.

You have a small restaurant, often using things like WiX or Squarespace, against a tech company with a dedicated SEO team. Good luck.

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