Pizza Hut is temporarily changing its name to Pasta Hut to highlight its eight new pasta dishes, with nine restaurants changing their signage immediately, in the UK
It registered the domain Pastahut.co.uk.
However it failed to register any other extension including the ..net or .org or .info
Not suprising that Pastahut.net, Pastahut.info and Pastahut.org have been registered and the sites filled with Google-style pay-per-click links, according to domain name specialist NetNames.
Pastahut.com was registered many years ago.
However, apparently Pizzahut did not attempt to buy this domain before the announcement was made.
According to reports the pizza chain plans to invest £100m over the next six years to revamp its 700 restaurants in the UK but according to NetNames it has overlooked implementing a solid online brand protection strategy by not registering some of its most valuable domains.
Jonathan Robinson, chief operating officer of NetNames, said: “It never fails to surprise us how quick off the mark cybersquatters are to register the domains of major brands where given the opportunity.
“The UK subsidiary of Pizza Hut will have spent much time and money planning for this rebrand, however they have failed to register some of the key domain names relating to their online brand.”
Its Incredible that a company would have plans to spend 180 million dollars to rebrand itself but not think of registering a few hundred dollars of domains and spending several thousand to acquire the .com version.
Now the media will give the domain industry another black eye, although “big business” once again proved incompetent in protecting its brand in the quickest, simplest manner.
Alan says
PastaHut.com has a creation date of June 7, 2000 – long before pizza hut made this decision so the owner got lucky
Greg Nelson says
Nice work Alan. Did the exact same check before seeing your comment. Guarantee this was not the plan in 2000.
MHB says
Guys
Just because the .com was taken doesn’t mean Pizzahut didn’t screw up.
They could have, before making any announcement, offer the guy some money and could have gotten the domain for 25K or less.
Now they are going to have to pay many times more or lose a lot of traffic.
Securing the domain does not only include registrations, but purchases as well, before the news is out
Alan says
Of course, the way I read the article was that someone registered the .com recently in hopes to cash in on the brand. Just wanted to make it clear the .com owner never.
PizzaHut screwed up – no doubt about that!
MHB says
Alan
I re-read the post and agree with you and have changed it around to address your comments
thanks
Damir says
Great post – Many thanks for it
Empedocles says
Pizza Hut are in the process of registering the Pasta Hut TM. The company has registered the county code .co.uk & the international .com Why would they want to cover any other dot whatever and play the ICAN version of chase me. ” “It never fails to surprise us how quick off the mark cybersquatters ” so some people trawl the TM applications and register a domain WOW I got a .me that will give a little work to hard up attorney.
” however they have failed to register some of the key domain names relating to their online brand.””
Pizza Hut do not need to chase ambulances they leave that to the “domain industry”