The Power of Internet Gripe Sites
Observations
Only 35 percent of the brandsucks domains we surveyed are owned by the brand found within the domain. Forty-five percent of the domains are currently available for registration and each one presents an opportunity for brand owners to reach out to the Internet community or to prevent a potential public relations nightmare. These sites garner traffic by luring legitimate buyers searching for the brand in addition to disgruntled customers and those that are simply curious to see the content on a potential gripe site. Brand owners are advised to take a serious look at the traffic that these names garner and the kind of unique marketing opportunity they can afford.
Loews, the popular movie theater chain (recently spun off from Loews Corporation to AMC), is the domain registrant of loewssucks.com and placed a “Guest Satisfaction Survey” on the page that resolves when users type this domain in their browser address bars. Loews makes good use of the domain in a way that allows it to reach out to customers and get feedback about their experiences. If a customer stumbled upon the site by accident, then he or she is likely to be impressed with the brand’s dedication to customer service. If a customer was looking for a gripe site, then the brand has at least tried to mitigate whatever poor experience led that customer to look for such a site. By doing so, the brand is essentially getting a second chance at providing a positive experience to their customer and restoring faith in their brand.
Loews, however, is one of the only brands in our study to optimally utilize a brandsucks domain. The percentage of brand-owned “sucks” sites that actually end up working against the brand is extraordinarily high. Eighty-three percent of the Web sites that go to a company-sponsored site simply resolve to the brand’s main homepage. This can be damaging to the brand because companies that do this are associating their brand with a memorable and negative domain name.
A company can pretend as though the “sucks” part of the domain isn’t there, but that does not mean that customers will do the same. Redirecting a brandsucks domain is not like redirecting a typo, where the Internet user may not even notice the difference between the name that they typed and the name that the page resolves to. A “sucks” domain is distinct and users who type brandsucks domains in the browser are doing so for a reason. Besides Loews, Southwest Airlines is the only other company in our sample set that owns the appropriate “sucks” domain and acknowledges the “sucks” part of the domain on the Web page that resolves. On southwestsucks.com, Southwest claims that they are protecting against inaccurate information and suggests that customers log on to the company’s official page for what they need to know about the airline. Though this is not quite as constructive as Loews’ approach, it still shows an awareness of the negative nature of the domain and presents a unique way of turning the domain into a more positive asset for the company by attempting to address customer grievances.
Beyond those companies that attempt to make use of the “sucks” domain names that they own are the companies that seem to register them purely for defensive purposes and simply warehouse them. In our study, 67 percent of the registered domains did not resolve (DNR) to any content whatsoever.
Once again, an Internet user is most likely to land on a brandsucks.com page for one of two reasons. They can stumble upon it while searching for the actual brand or product via search engines and click on a link to it out of curiosity, or they may be looking for a gripe site via search or direct navigation in order to read consumer opinions or post their own. Either way, the user is not provided with a meaningful experience that reflects favorably on the brand. Chances are, if the customer was looking for a legitimate site and happened upon a page that does not resolve, they will shrug off the detour and continue on; if they were looking for a gripe site and couldn’t find one, they might continue searching, or just be fed up and drop their search. The company is not successfully promoting its brand in either instance, and while this may be innocuous in the first case, it is a lost opportunity in the second.
Successful promotion of one’s brand means always being where the customer expects you to be, and making a positive impact with your trademark whenever a worthwhile occasion presents itself. Given that the brandsucks domain is such an intuitive gripe name, it presents one of those opportunities. This study not only shows how overlooked this strategy is, but how a brand’s lost opportunity can become another’s gained opportunity.
For instance, we found that a large number of brandsucks domains on our list had been registered by a single individual, Dan Parisi, an infamous domain name speculator and cybersquatter, perhaps best known for maintaining a pornography Web site on the domain “whitehouse.com” for several years.
Early US case law protects registrars from trademark liability for the actions of their customers; the purpose of insulating registrars from such liability is to encourage the growth of the Internet industry, which could be crippled if registrars had to engage in a complicated and expensive trademark clearance for every purchase. However, brand owners must be aware that this provision also leaves them with fewer safeguards against the infringement of their brands and forces them to scrutinize the alignment of their partners’ goals with their own.
Brand owners can create a safeguard against damaging infringement by developing a proactive domain name strategy that allows them to focus on what is most likely to be intuitive to users that practice direct navigation and stay one step ahead of cybersquatters. The lack of this type of strategy can leave brands in a situation similar to that of Dutch financial services institution Rabobank Group. A third party owns rabobanksucks.com and is pointing the domain to the IP address of Rabobank’s global home page. As a result, someone browsing the site is provided with official Rabobank content along with the constant reminder that they are browsing it under the rabobanksucks.com moniker.
Sometimes, when brands find that a third party owns their brandsucks domain, they look to recover the name by leveraging the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). In order to be successful, the brand owner would have to find that 1) the domain name in question is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or a service to which the Complainant has rights, 2) the Respondent (the domain holder) has no rights or legitimate interests with respect to the domain name and 3) the domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith. All three of these criteria must be met in order for a transfer to take place; otherwise, the complaint will be denied.2
The application of these criteria, however, can vary greatly. In our data set, panels regularly noted that they were informed, though not bound, by the decisions of earlier arbitration panels. This is part of the flexibility of the UDRP, which is meant to secure its ability to handle new challenges that arise in the domain name space and reflect that trademark rights can differ depending on the country where the mark is used. At the same time, this does eliminate some predictability in the enforcement process and can leave brands uncertain of how to proceed. Taking a look at all 84 UDRP decisions on brandsucks domain names, however, produced some useful information on how UDRP proceedings tend to unfold.
Fifty-six percent of the complaints filed in the data set resulted in the transfer of the domain name to the trademark owner; 31 percent resulted in the complaint being denied. The rest of the disputes were either withdrawn (9 cases) or are still under review (1 case). According to WIPO, 80 percent of UDRP decisions in general favor the Complainant and lead to transfer. Therefore, brandsucks domains are significantly (30%) less likely to lead to transfer than other domain constructions that include a trademark or something that closely resembles a trademark.
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