5 Alive – or not so alive…? Poorly-timed domain name cases

It pays to stay on top of your domain names.  It seems like The Coca Cola Company did not with their 5 Alive drink.

They recently come out on the wrong side of a couple of domain name decisions relating to the domain names www.5alive.co.uk and www.fivealive.co.uk. In both cases the Expert found that Coca Cola had not proven that the registrant had registered the domain names in bad faith.  In the 5alive.co.uk case, the Expert went a little further..

The registrant had found that the domain name 5alive.com was not registered to Coca Cola.  The Expert picked up on this, and also the fact that Coca Cola were apparently just about to launch a new marketing campaign in the UK.  The timing of the complaint seemed to be with that in mind – to succeed and get a domain name transferred to them to use for marketing campaigns.

As always, it seems that painting the right picture is important – Coca Cola seem to have attracted the Expert’s ire by the timing of their action, having had some 6 years with few domain names and then a sudden “push” to get them.