Seth Godin’s blog is one of those must reads that occasionally contains a real gem. Something that makes you stop and think hard.<\/p>\n
One recent gem was his More Failed Efforts at Control<\/a><\/b> post about how Tate & Lyle and Johnson & Johnson, the makers of the artificial sweetener ‘Splenda’<\/a><\/b> have bought-up almost 300, yes 300<\/b> domain names with negative connotations about their product. <\/p>\n Seth’s blog links to the Sustainable is Good<\/a><\/b> blog that describes it in much more detail. For example, how when Dr. Janet Hull wrote a book exposing Splenda’s not so sweet side and promoted it on the website Splenda Exposed<\/a><\/b>, they bought up the splendaexposed.net, .org, .biz, and .info domain names. <\/p>\n It is one thing to expect bad publicity about a product like Splenda, but it is another entirely to buy-up almost 300 negative domain names. It makes you wonder if when they are clearly expecting so much trouble, whether there is something fundamentally wrong with their product. <\/p>\n It also makes you wonder of they really understand how people with a mission will find an audience one way or another. Dr. Janet Hull did. There is always going to be a negative domain name with Splenda somewhere in it that the makers didn’t think to buy. Or ones with other extensions. Or ones in other languages. <\/p>\n A quick search for ‘Splenda’ on Google shows what I mean. The first few pages of results all divide into one of two camps: either all sweetness and light from the Splenda camp complete with corporate imagery, recipes and the inevitable online resellers, or all doom and gloom from the anti-Splenda camp with medical reports, negative testimonials and scare stories. <\/p>\n It looks suspiciously like Splenda’s makers have won the negative domain name battle, but lost the war for the hearts and minds of the Internet.<\/p>\n What do you think? Are the makers of Splenda tilting at domain name windmills? Or is this a legitimate defense strategy?<\/p>\n Post a comment and get the conversation going.<\/p>\n Graham Hill<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Seth Godin’s blog is one of those must reads that occasionally contains a real gem. Something that makes you stop and think hard. One recent gem was his More Failed Efforts at Control post about how Tate & Lyle and Johnson & Johnson, the makers of the artificial sweetener ‘Splenda’ have bought-up almost 300, yes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6458,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[128,86,36,83,87],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80005"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6458"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}