Pizza Hut changing its name to Pasta Hut causes great turmoil

In order to attract more attention to its pasta range, Pizza Hut recently decided to rebrand 8 of its establishments in the UK to Pasta Hut. 100 million £ have been cleared for the creation of the concept and the actual name change. The domain name http://www.pastahut.co.uk has also been registered.

Pastahut.com was registered years ago, but Pizza Hut did not undertake any action to buy this domain name from its owner before the company had officially communicated its rebranding intentions. Also, Pizza Hut forgot to register pastahut.net, pastahut.org and other variations. Typo pirates, however, did not and placed Google ads on the sites carrying these domain names.

This situation once again proves that, if one wishes to avoid nasty surprises, online branding and the value of domain names are not to be neglected during planning and strategy development.