Ladbrooks? Ladbrookes? Uh-uh…try Ladbrokes!

Looking through some stuff on the web today and it amazed me how many people mis-spell “Ladbrokes”. Apparently last month there were over 60,000 Google searches for “Ladbrookes” and nearly 50,000 for “Ladbrooks”. It made me think how the Internet has changed branding concepts.

I mean back in the day, pre Internet, no-one probably thought twice about naming a brand with a pronunciation that sounded different to the spelling. But these days, potentially it not only allows traffic to bypass you, but also opens the door for competitors to capitalise. Or in Ladbrokes case, affiliates. That said, I notice that ahead of all the mis-spellings when you search on “Ladbrooks” or “Ladbrookes”, the real Ladbrokes still come top. But that’s largely down to Google’s intelligence I guess.

And even more amazingly we recently had the much hyped launch of the “Cuil” search engine (pronounced “cool”). Well I would have thought that, while clearly original, the name “Cuil” is going to miss out on some traffic. Ironic it’s a search engine, and even more ironic than on the day it launched, it didn’t even appear on the first page of it’s own search results.

Anyway, there you go…my thought for the day.

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