The Product can establish your presence in the marketplace, but it’s the brand that moves you forward. Brand is what you build. Brand is your identity. Thus it’s no surprise that people are very sensitive about it and take great measures to protect it.
However, this can also turn ugly sometimes. Some people are so insecure about their brands that instead of strengthening their own brand, they start to denigrate rival brands. They use different techniques to carry on their mischief. As also with our today’s story, this may include registering domain names.
Non-alcoholic beverages are becoming more and more popular. As fitness is getting more and more awareness, people are moving away from alcoholic beverages and opting for non-alcoholic ones. This led many new entrants into the segment, which made one particular old timer extremely angry.
He is Reynald Grattagliano. Reynald is the founder of ArKay Beverages. Reynald has been operating a non-alcoholic beverage firm for more than a decade. However, several competitors of ArKay, faced a common issue.
Spiritless is another Kentucky based non-alcoholic firm that launched its first product Kentucky 74. However, after a short while the domain name Kentucky74.com was up and running. Interestingly, it redirected to ArkayBeverages.com.
Ben Barson on similar lines formed his own non-alcoholic brand Seedlip. However, the domain name BenBarson.com was taken and running. Not only that, BenBarson.com was also posting fake news and trolling Ben.
Reynald was behind all of these incidents. He has been targeting a number of non-alcoholic brands. In fact it wasn’t just these two domain names. He registered a number of domain names.
He has also with him, SpiritlessKentucky74.com, RitualzeroProof.com.mx along with several other domain names. He uses these domain names to either promote his own brand or to post fake news denigrating rival brands.
Practices like these are illegal and shouldn’t be tolerated. But it appears that no serious legal action has been taken against him and mostly people take him as an annoyance, rather than an actual threat. It is normal to be protective of your brand but shaming other brands through illegal means is just not done.
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