Jeff Bennett: Welcome to Swap.com

Last month I posted that Swaptree had acquired Swap.com. This is a big deal for a young company operating in a developing category. Our goal is to lead this category, and what better name and domain for the company other than the category name itself. This week we made the switch from Swaptree.com to Swap.com and we updated our logo on our site. Today, I want to give some insight into why we have become Swap.com and where we are going…

First, the essence of what our members do when they are on our site is very simple: they “swap.” We are committed to continuing to grow our platform for books, music, movies and games and we have plans to expand into other swap categories. Swap.com is the root of our current brand and speaks to something bigger, and bigger is what we aspire to be.

Second, brand building is very challenging and can be very expensive. Gone are the “Mad Men” days of creating a positioning and spending lots of dough to reinforce it. Today is about combining incredible customer experience, domain name and branding activity, all which can efficiently be positioned across many channels. The experience and brand have to be memorable if we’re going to enable success. The holy grail is creating a chance at viral or “word of mouth” communication – Swap.com is short, actionable and memorable, and it should greatly enhance our brand building initiatives.

Lastly, consumers swap for many reasons but a common theme for swapping is saving money. The visual that seems universally accepted for “sales,” “discounts,” “markdowns,” “tag sales,” are those colorful dots that indicate how much a consumer can save if they buy a particular item. A logo has to befit the experience of a service. With the help of some of the best branding minds on the planet, we embarked on a fun and exhilarating journey to create a logo that would best fit our company and plans. With all of this in mind we created our new “swap dot” logo to serve as the emblem of Swap.com.

Our team is very dedicated to enhancing our service and the relationship we have with our existing members. We are also dedicated to implementing our expanded strategy and creating a category-leading company. We will do this by continuing to enhance our site and expanding into new categories that our members want … and millions of others consumers are involved in. And in the process, we’ll bring the benefits of online swapping to millions of other consumers who participate in swapping all of the time. It is a tall order but we are up for it.

Thanks for your support as we navigated from Swaptree to Swap.com. If you have any questions or comments please add them to this post, discuss them on our Facebook or Twitter pages, or message me directly – I am @ SwapChief on the site. I wish you continued happy Swapping @ Swap.com!