A brief note re the Bodog brand no longer being associated with online gaming.
I'm turning 65 this year, and as I start to slow down, I want my brands to do likewise.
For those of you interested in where this all started, here's a little history.
My online gaming career started as a technology provider to other firms, so when it came time to launch my own site, I had plenty of front-row experience as to what I didn’t want to do.
All my clients’ brands included the words ‘gambling,’ ‘bet’ or ‘sports,’ but I had ambitions that went far beyond gaming.
My inspiration came from Richard Branson’s Virgin, originally a record store/label that eventually branched out to numerous unrelated sectors.
‘Virgin’ wasn’t wedded to a specific sector, so all Branson had to do was add the appropriate suffix to fit whatever new business he entered (soft drinks, airlines, mobile phones, and yes, online gaming).
I wanted that same flexibility but also a name that would stand out from the crowd.
I wrote a 14-point checklist of features my company name had to have: short (six letters or less), visual symmetry (if you look at the Bodog typeface, it’s all circles and vertical lines), the idea that if you read it you’d know how to pronounce it and if you heard it you’d know how to spell it, etc.
But I also wanted it to be memorable, to have a certain stickiness, something that would make people ask each other: what’s a Bodog?
It was also, like Virgin, a blank slate onto which I could project whatever pictures I wanted.
After coming up with a bunch of names that met this criteria, I sat down at the computer one night and checked if domain names had already been registered.
Of the names that cleared this hurdle, Bodog was the one that leaped off the page.
I was pretty much the only member of my early team who was enthusiastic about the name. It was like Reservoir Dogs, where nobody wanted to be Mr. Pink.
They all wanted to know what the hell Bodog meant. I told them ‘nothing… yet.’ The rest, as they say, is history.
Name me a brand that started from less and built itself into more.
