According to a story in TechCrunch today, a European company which they describe as being an “international mobile roaming and app company” announced it was changing its name to just “Tru”.
The problem as TechCrunch points out is that they don’t own the domain name Tru.com.
That domain seems to be owned by Toys R Us.
So the company that is changing their corporate name from TruPhone to Tru is stuck still having to use their old domain name truPhone.com.
It also seems the company doesn’t even own tru.eu.
You might think the company does not want to go with a .eu domain but they do own truphone.eu and tru.eu appears to be a parked page which one thinks they could have picked up rather cheaply, well before the announcement, especially since the parked domain Tru.eu has a for sale link back to a Sedo page.
We often see American companies that simply don’t get the domain thing, now it appears there are plenty of them on the other side of the pond that are likewise domain challenged.
perhaps not a mistake at all.
they are using tru.co
yes it currently forwards to truphone.com
http://tru.co
their ability to acquire the “tru.co” domain may have been the deciding factor to push forward with their namechange. They are based in the UK and perhaps .co was the perfect solution for them, especially considering that tru.com may be off the market. Time will tell if they heavily promote .co
Boggles the mind. However, I’m sure either their IT or Marketing Dept believes in the typical corporate mantra that the domain name doesn’t matter that much. Still hard to believe and it’s almost 2011.
“We often see American companies that simply don’t get the domain thing, now it appears there are plenty of them on the other side of the pond that are likewise domain challenged.”
Either that or the Branding/marketing “Gurus” are just trying to make extra work for themselves, there’s nothing wrong with their previous domain Truphone.com unless they plan to branch out into other areas (no mention of that in the article)
Probably not much chance of getting tru.com off toys r us either but will they even bother trying ??
it happened also to Google and Apple, so…
Let them pay for not having the right domain name.
Businesses are losing big money for not having the right name for their business.
Wow, that’s a company that doesn’t understand marketing. I’m sure the CMO/Marketing Director will get fired for this. A really basic error.
As the company is involved with telecoms, I wonder how much of this is related to the marketing folks there not understanding modern-day marketing. Seems very old-school to not think these kind of things through.