Many companies have a multi-brand strategy where they compete in the same market multiple times under different brands. Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury are all the same company. So are Coke and Sprite, Tide and Gain, Dawn and Joy, Kool-Aid and Capri-Sun. For physical products and businesses a brand is expensive, but online it's much cheaper. Many small online sites run multiple brands so they can test out different strategies. For example, if I search for "health insurance" I get a bunch of ads:
- gohealthinsurance.com
- low-cost-health-insurance.com
- individualhealthquotes.com
- yourfreequotes.com
- lowerhealthquotes.com
- get-insurance-quotes.org
- inexpensive-health-insurance.org
- lowerhealthquotes.com
- easierhealthinsurance.com
- individualhealthquotes.com
- gohealthinsurance.com
- yourfreequotes.com
- dollarglobeinsurance.com
Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Not only that, but they're running on the same IP address and both say "Bank Rate" in their whois data. Who else is there? It looks like easierhealthinsurance.com is the same as yourfreequotes.com, which we already saw:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Checking the whois data, they're also the same people as lowerhealthquotes.com, but with a very different design. All three are running on the same IP, however.
It would be interesting to have a site where you could put in one brand and get all the competing brands run by the same people. Getting the data would require lots of automated filtering, but there are a lot of signals you could use: whois data, IPs and routing, server software, images, tracking pixel companies, textual similarity, javascript libraries, the list is huge. The tricky part is that I'm not sure there's actually much useful you could do with this information. Maybe if you wanted to sell something to these companies and didn't want to approach the same company multiple times?
(I've nofollowed all the links here.)
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