Miranda reads rivals his rights

What’s in a name? If you’re LastMinuteTravel.com, just about everything.

That would explain the lengths to which the Atlanta travel site has gone to protect its moniker. LastMinuteTravel.com trademarked not only its name, URL and motto, “Just Released Offers. Just Go,” but guarded its rights with an uncommon vigilance.

Consider what happened last month on the heels of several reports that suggested the market for spontaneous travel would take off. Competitor Priceline.com promptly declared itself the “home” of last-minute travel in an effort to capitalize on the emerging trend.

“We couldn’t let them do that,” says LastMinuteTravel.com chief executive David Miranda. When his company pointed out that it owned more or less every right to the words “last minute travel,” Priceline.com caved in and changed its advertising campaign – an action that Miranda says cost Priceline.com “a lot.”

Priceline.com downplayed the incident.

“LastMinuteTravel.com wanted to make sure there was no confusion with the services they offered, so they contacted us,” says Brian Ek, a spokesman for Priceline.com. “We made a couple of mutually agreeable Web site copy changes and that was that.”

Not quite. The Priceline.com chapter may be closed, but Miranda isn’t done reading his rights to rivals. This week, LastMinuteTravel.com announced several additional uses for its federal trademark, turning up its branding efforts by a couple of notches. Its message: we own the last-minute travel market.

Miranda’s company may hold a compelling trademark, but whether it’s got a lock on the industry segment is less clear. It’s hard to come up with a handful of travel sites that aren’t trying to get into the act of selling distressed inventory online, all of which means that if nothing else, LastMinuteTravel.com’s attorneys will remain busy.

But Miranda, a former vice president for Holiday Inn Worldwide’s brand advertising, has made his point. In a world of difficult-to-distinguish dot-coms, effective branding can spell the difference between an IPO and a Chapter 11 filing. “A good brand has a multiplier effect,” he says. It raises a company’s public profile, revenues and business opportunities.

Here’s how to “brand” your business the Miranda way:

- Create a brand architecture, but be flexible when you build it. Miranda says that a brand requires careful planning. “You have to consider the brand identity before you can begin building it,” he says. But at the same time, a company must be flexible and allow the brand to evolve. Miranda calls this “stratactics” – a combination of strategy and tactics. “Always ask yourself: ‘What is this brand going to accomplish?’”

- Bring in the professionals. LastMinuteTravel recruited veteran marketer Sergio Zyman, the former chief marketing officer at Coca Cola, for advice. Says Miranda: “You have to know what you want and you have to bring in the right people to do it.” Zyman helped Miranda and his team think about their brand in an unconventional way. “We asked questions like, ‘If this brand were a person, what would it look like, sound like, feel like?’” he says.

- Make it real. The challenge, as far as LastMinuteTravel.com is concerned, was to “take something intangible and make it tangible,” says Miranda. “This is no longer the realm of the generic.” Tapping Zyman’s advice was, in many ways, prescient. “Coke is basically brown sugar-flavored water, but it’s worth millions of dollars as a brand,” says Miranda.

Without a mad scramble to profit from the last-minute travel trend, Miranda’s brand wouldn’t be worth the paper its trademark is printed on, and he’s the first to admit that. But with sites like Expedia, Hotwire, Site59.com and Priceline.com all over this market like hit counters lining the bottom of amateur Web sites, things are different.

Once the trend cools, will LastMinuteTravel.com have a strong enough brand to survive? That remains to be seen.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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