Kenmore Flops Alfie Smart Shopper Online Branding

Kenmore has been expanding the brand from appliances to consumer electronics recently and the latest product launch is “Alfie” a “smart shopping” app that works with a small device similar to Amazon’s Echo / Alexa. How did they do for online branding of the new product?

Here is my digital branding look at how they did securing the new brand and using a make sense, easy to remember domain for it.

I give Kenmore a big FLOP when it comes to securing the brand and using make sense domain names.

Kenmore Alfie Smart Shopper

1.) The name of this device is going to be simply referred to as “Alfie”. The best domain name, that simply makes sense for the brand to use is Alfie.com. Kenmore does NOT own it, an individual, Alfie Meek does and has been using it as a campaign website for his run of Commissioner of District Four. Trip and fall #1!

2.) Many brands ride new products on the “main” brand name, aka Kenmore Alfie. Kenmore does this on product packaging and the device itself holds only “Kenmore” on it from what I can see from images. Kenmore Alfie becomes an important keyword set, because that is what it is! Kenmore failed big time and didn’t even register the domain name KenmoreAlfie.com as it’s available to register at the time of this article. Big time fail IMO and trip and fall #2 and #3 really!

KenmoreAlfie.com

3.) For whatever reason, Kenmore or a hired company felt the best domain name to use to help promote the new product/brand was AlfieFetch.com? Really? AlfieFetch.com? Alfie.com would be #1, KenmoreAlfie.com #2 and AlfieFetch.com shouldn’t be on the radar. Trip and fall #4.

The product seems to come out of Sears Israel, which is behind the Shop Your Way site, which Sears acquired in 2009 from Delver.

I really do not know what Sears was thinking, because they really failed domain wise on securing the brand and easily allowing consumers to find the product! The only good thing they did was to use the Alfie keyword in the domain they did use, which they hand registered on October 13, 2015 five days prior to filling a trademark on Alfie.

Since Kenmore is putting a focus on “Alfie”, the best domain name would be Alfie.com for the brand/product. The next best option if they could not obtain that domain, would be the “longer” version, but still very relevant: KenmoreAlfie.com. Similar domain names like AlfieAssistant.com, AlfieSmartShopper.com, AlfieApp.com, IntelligentShopper.com (for sale) etc. should also be considered to own and potentially use for advertising or simply securing the brand.

Sorry Kenmore but you failed when it comes to domain names for Alfie!

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