05.14.08
Is Kijiji the sound of Ebay’s jungle cry?
There is plenty of places for successful abstract names in branding. But to have an abstract name that you can barely pronounce and worse, is very, very difficult to read in most fonts and almost anyone’s handwriting, that is really stupid.
No wonder EBay is suing Craigslist! Their own classified offering might even work if it just had a name intelligible to western ears, especially one with as much recognition as Craigslist (even though Craig himself didn’t want this name to stay on the door…. luckily wiser heads prevailed).
So we know that Ebay copied the classified ad idea from Craigslist, and the dots in the logo from Google, but we are not sure from which monkey-speak they copied the name. (We do not intentionally mean to offend Japanese character names here… just this name is not for the Japanese market). But they ended up with a very difficult name to type and read, let alone relate to.
Why couldn’t they just copy themselves and call me to sell them the domain KeenBay.com? At least you can read and spell and say it.. even on a quickly scribbled note.
