Bad Marketing & Bad Domain Names Kill Businesses & Cause Lawsuits

Perhaps this is a lawsuit as a marketing strategy, but recently a smaller private company sued BankRate for being a monopoly

A private company based in White Plains is suing Bankrate Inc., saying it has unlawfully suppressed its competition in order to build a monopoly. ...

BanxCorp aggregates, publishes and distributes bank-rate data from financial institutions nationwide through its BanxQuote.com Web site. Bankrate, a much larger, public company based in Florida, owns and operates Bankrate.com.

Bankrate's informational name adds credibility and trust to their offering, as does their slogan Comprehensive. Objective. Free. The distribution deals also help build their brand and aid that image. All of these likely increase trust and conversion rate, and may make some consumers go so far as to think they are a non profit industry body or an extension of the government.

Bankrate may be a near monopoly, but having a misspelled domain name and letting the media describe your field of service using the competitor's business name isn't going to help you dethrone the champ. Not only is BanxQuote.com a bad domain name, but it is only a PageRank 4. How serious can these guys be about suing the competition when they haven't even tried marketing their business?

Published: August 6, 2007 by Aaron Wall in marketing

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