When Overstock.com announced earlier this year that it was making a big push on its name change to O.co, many were less than enthusiastic. Okay, a lot of people thought it was a really bad idea.
As evidence, we point to a RetailWire poll in June in which 65 percent said the name change would be either somewhat negative (24 percent) or very negative (41 percent) for the e-tailer. No one polled voted it as a positive move.
Fast-forward to the present and it turns out that Overstock.com did, in fact, make a big mistake. The company has admitted as much. Many consumers continued to call it Overstock.com after the name change and others were going to O.com (a url not owned by Overstock) instead of O.co.
"What we learned was that we haven't yet adequately transferred the decade of brand equity we have in Overstock.com," Jonathan Johnson, president of Overstock, told Mashable. "We're down-shifting the rebranding effort in order to leverage and transfer that brand equity."
A translation of Mr. Johnson's remarks is that Overstock.com is back on just about everything with the exception of the coliseum where the Oakland Raiders and Athletics play.
Mr. Johnson, however, continues to insist that O.co is not dead.
He told Advertising Age, "We're still focused on getting to O.co, just at a slower pace. ... We're not flipping back, we're just refocusing."