Corn Refiners Association Knows What’s Important When it Comes to Rebranding

There’s an interesting article in the New York Times today about the Corn Refiners Association’s attempt to rebrand the high-fructose corn syrup ingredient that’s apparently earned the scorn and concern of health conscience consumers.

If you’ve ever read the label of just about any type of processed food, you’ve probably seen high-fructose corn syrup close to the top of the ingredient list. I don’t know much about this product, but according to the article and some research published by a market research firm, “about 58 percent of Americans say they are concerned that high-fructose corn syrup poses a health risk.”

I guess in an effort to change perceptions of this ingredient, the Corn Refiners Association has chosen to refer to this ingredient as “Corn Sugar.” The organization smartly bought the corresponding CornSugar.com domain name, and they have information about it on the website.

Perhaps as a result of owning the exact match keyword domain name, CornSugar.com ranks in the top 10 in Google for the “corn sugar” search, despite the fact that the domain name has only been owned by the organization since June of 2010. For some reason, the registration is showing a creation date of June 2010, but if you look at its Whois History, you can see this domain name was previously owned by Buy Domains as recently as May 2010.

Smart move by the CRA to own the brand in .com (.net and .org, too).

Comments (7)

tricolorro

September 14th, 2010 at 7:05 pm

Elliot,

It’s possible you were inadvertently looking at the
“Updated Date” which is right above the “Creation Date”.

Updated Date: 11-jun-2010
Creation Date: 01-oct-2002
Expiration Date: 01-oct-2016

Elliot

September 14th, 2010 at 7:07 pm

@ tricolorro

You can have a look at the screenshot I took of the Domaintools Whois lookup page and see that the creation date is listed as June of 2010:

http://www.elliotsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Picture-13.png

tricolorro

September 14th, 2010 at 9:01 pm

Elliot,

My comment was not meant as a criticism.

I had originally checked the WhoIs at iWhoIs.com and at Internic.

Both show the creation date as Oct 01, 2002.

That’s why I thought you might have looked at the wrong line.

Not a criticism.

DomainTools still shows the creation date as June 11, 2010

and so does the WhoIs at GoDaddy.

But all show the expiration date as Oct 01, 2016 which makes sense.

Think about it.

If the creation date was in June , June would also be the
expiration date.

For whatever reason, Domaintools and GoDaddy are using the Updated date as the Creation date.

That’s the only reason I can see why a June 2010 creation date is listed.

Elliot

September 14th, 2010 at 10:18 pm

@ tri

Didn’t take it as criticism, but just showing what I saw

Magie

September 14th, 2010 at 11:09 pm

Renaming, rebranding all this stuff just won’t hide the fact that what they call corn sugar is still HCFS! Just a very sweet sugarcoated issue to mislead consumer.

gregb

September 15th, 2010 at 3:01 am

I like to look at archive.org as part of any domain investigation. In this case I see a page from Feb 10, 2003 – http://web.archive.org/web/20030210010740/cornsugar.com/about.html

tw morse

September 15th, 2010 at 10:21 am

What’s interesting is that the previously generic term “corn sugar” seems to be now “branded” by the assn. A check of the other extensions shows they have some of the other .net, .org — the .info was snagged a day or two ago; however, according to the ‘terms’ page for the .com site, this may become a problem for the .info owner:

http://www.cornsugar.com/terms-conditions/

SECTION: Proprietary Rights

…Our trademarks and trade dress may not be used, including as part of trademarks and/or as part of domain names, in connection with any product or service in any manner that is likely to cause confusion and may not be copied, imitated, or used, in whole or in part, without the prior written permission of the Corn Refiners Association. All rights are reserved.