Grindr created a $3.7 billion dollar company with a name you dislike.
It's not a name I dislike, it's objectively a bad brand when compared to Grinder. That's my argument.
You can still succeed with an inferior brand, it's just more difficult.
Those of you who worry about these misspellings, miss the other side. Dictionary words are not the end all. Dictionary+Dictionary are not either. When I ask you to go to a website called Clean ex where would you go? Kleenex? I think not. How about if I asked you to go to Zeer Ox? Would you go to Xerox? Brands use creative spellings all the time and the 2 examples are just 2 of thousands of successful use cases.
Fanciful brands are fine, but they're a lot harder to market.
The benefit of having something like CleanX or CleanEx over Kleenex is that it's a lot easier to get the ball rolling. Kleenex sounds fine to you because we've been conditioned to think it sounds fine over decades of marketing and product exposure.
But you're holding on to domains that you think are valuable, and a large chunk of that value is marketability so you're holding on to windflow.com and not weendr.com.
These "you have to have the dictionary word" arguments are unimaginative. They are pushed by domainers - not brands. A dictionary word is unnecessary and actually could be harmful (i.e., unmemorable, untrademarkable).
Dictionary words are gold because you're constantly reminded of them.
You pick up a cook book and come across the phrase "grind the peppers into a fine powder... oh look there's the word grind like that company Grinder."
It might not happen every time to everyone. But it's technically free marketing.
Should Kleenex have been Cleanex? Would that have been better? No. They had to spend millions on marketing either way. We had no idea what Cleanex or Kleenex was until they marketed it. None. Kleenex didn't lose out on anything. They are one of the most famous brands in the world.
I think CleanEx would've been a lot easier to market. Clean + Extreme = CleanEx, boom! It makes sense, you don't have to explain how it's spelled, and so on.
But to be fair, I do think this is the wrong kind of brand for this discussion. Because you're talking about an established product brand for a company that's been around for a hundred years.
The people you're selling domains to are either start-ups that understand the value of a good brand, or the marketing departments of a growing company.
These arguments would have us believe Kleenex would've been better off as Tissue.com. And that is laughable (imho)
I do agree with this.
A brand should balance fancifulness and genericity, and I think both extremes are harmful to the marketability of a brand. If a brand is difficult to spell or remember, then that's bad, and if it's just a word for the product or service it feels white label (cheap), it's makes it difficult to communicate (are you talking about Tissue the product brand or tissue the product), and it would be difficult to enforce your trademark.
A way to get around this is to use a word that is not directly related to product or service, like the aforementioned grinder.
