Why ChatGPT's New Home at Chat.com Is Pure Marketing Genius
“Our lives are frittered away with detail. Simplify, simplify,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. In response, Ralph Waldo Emerson quipped, “One ‘simplify’ would have sufficed.”
This delicious exchange perfectly captures OpenAI’s latest power move.
The hope here is to follow a trend of companies who’ve become so ubiquitous their brand names naturally become part of our lingo.
Think about when you Google something, Uber somewhere, Venmo someone, or Slack them.
OpenAI just joined an elite club by snagging chat.com.
It’s not just random luck.
These companies share a pattern:
- They dominated their category early.
- They made something complex dead simple.
- Their brand names were shorter/easier than the traditional term.
- They solved a universal need.
Google it replaced ‘search the internet’.
Let's Uber replaced ‘call a taxi’.
Venmo me replaced ‘pay me later’.
Each simplified not just the action, but the underlying language behind how we think about that action.
Let's Uber replaced ‘call a taxi’.
Venmo me replaced ‘pay me later’.
Each simplified not just the action, but the underlying language behind how we think about that action.
They’re not just betting on AI chat becoming universal; they’re betting on becoming the de facto shortform for AI interactions.
When we think about the top AI tools in this space, none of the names, besides Claude, really anchor on simplicity.
Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, Pi, LLaMA, and Mistral all sound like startup names pitched in a Silicon Valley boardroom.
But for the average user, one syllable is way more conversational than three.
Its much easier to say “Ask Claude” (an easy mental throwback to the Ask Jeeves of the early internet days) or “Let’s Chat it.” or “Did you run this by Chat?” than any of the alternatives.
If the goal of AI companies is to move from business use cases to everyday users for widespread adoption, then the strategy should be, as Thoreau and Emerson so eloquently put it:
“Simplify!”
Now, when you’re explaining Chat to the non-techies in your circle, there’s no reason to remember the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer part .
(A phrase that really rolls off the tongue, and something I know we’ve all already memorized.)
Instead, its name explains its function: you talk to it, and it helps you simplify the complex through dialogue.
But here’s what excites my copywriter brain: shorter domains mean fewer typos.
That’s fewer lost visitors.
More accidental finders: “Hey, what’s this?”.
And it’s one step closer to transforming their brand into a verb.
In marketing, we call this reducing friction.
The more ingrained it becomes in everyday speech, the more hits to your website.
The timing is too perfect.
As AI chatbots become as common as email providers, OpenAI is positioning itself as the AOL Instant Messenger of LLMs.
(I’ve lost half my audience with this reference. 😑)
Not the technical choice.
Not the complicated choice.
Just… the choice.
For branding fanatics like me, there are three huge lessons here:
- Simplicity. If you can say it in fewer words (or letters), do it.
- Own your niche. Start by solving real business problems before making yourself the universal solution.
- Reduce friction. The easier you make it for people to find you, the more likely they’ll associate your brand with the solution their looking for.
Five years from now, will we look back at this shift as a time when AI became way more accessible?
Dharmesh Shah, Hubspot’s CTO, made this 15.5 million purchase thinking 5 steps ahead in the AI space.
Time will tell if Claude or Chat become the go-to verb for everyday AI.
In a similar move, ConvertKit packed up their things and UHauled their way into Kit.com.
A slightly less market-specific keyword that reminds me of another famous Kitt — the original AI sidekick from Knight Rider.
That’s right.
Before David Hasselhoff was running in slow motion across the beaches of Baywatch, he was cruising around in Knight Industries Two Thousand (KITT) Pontiac Grand Am, giving us one of the first tastes of human AI companionship that was actually symbiotic.
We've come a long way from a talking car in the 80s to chatbots in our pockets.
But anyone using AI regularly knows that LLMs aren’t foolproof.
And a rebrand won’t magically boost Chat’s effectiveness by any means.
But as KITT might say, “On the contrary, Michael, instead of being a problem-ridden prototype, I’m the new and improved model!”
What do you think of GPT's new rebrand?
Let us know in the comments!
Let us know in the comments!