On the Record: Olive.com

In April 2020, Repair Ventures launched Olive, an extended car warranty platform that entered the highly competitive, multi-billion dollar Insurtech industry. With Olive’s entire service range available online, a successful digital strategy was vital.

As with most new businesses, Olive couldn’t secure its desired domain name, in this case, Olive.com, straight away. Instead, the company built on GoGetOlive.com. A year later, Olive managed to acquire the Olive.com domain name for an undisclosed fee.

In this edition of On the Record, we chat with Paul Sherman, the Chief Marketing Officer for Olive. We discuss Olive’s digital strategy, why the company has now opted to acquire Olive.com, and how owning Olive.com makes Sherman’s life as a CMO that little bit easier.

Can you tell us about Olive, and what the company does?Olive provides mechanical breakdown insurance in California, and vehicle service contacts throughout the rest of the USA, but not yet in Washington or Florida.

We are an InsureTech company with 100% quote, sales, and account management available online. It’s the easiest way to cover your car from breakdowns.

Why Olive? Where did the brand name originate?

We developed the brand in the second half of 2019, and rolled out the Olive products in April of 2020. We like the name as it is approachable, friendly, different from the others in our industry. It’s fun and easy to say, and there are some good plays on the word; “Get olive it covered.”

Were there any other options for brand names when creating the brand?

Yes, but we opted for Olive as it was one no one in our industry uses. We played around with words that had “coverage” in them but chose to build a brand with a less contrived name.

Was domain name availability a factor that was considered when forming Olive?

Yes, we knew olive.com was available and that no competitors used the name. We weren’t quite ready to buy olive.com when we started, so we settled on “gogetolive.com” because we liked the “action” in the domain.

When did you start to consider upgrading to Olive.com?

We considered it from the start, but with our success over the last year and our investment in media and brand amplification platforms, along with team sponsorships, it became more important to own olive.com to make it even easier for our customers and prospects to find us.

Why did you ultimately decide to acquire Olive.com rather than stick with GoGetOlive.com?

Because of our significant investments in broadcast and streaming platforms.

How does owning Olive.com make your job as a CMO easier?

By having olive.com, it really adds a level of credibility to our brand and helps to drive name recognition as we do more TV and Connected TV ads.

Our previous domain www.GoGetOlive.com worked great on digital advertising, however, it wasn’t as effective as we opened up our marketing to sports sponsorships and TV where you only have a few seconds for prospects to see your brand. Olive.com is easy and memorable.

You’ve only just acquired Olive.com, but how do you expect Olive.com to positively impact the company and its future success?

It will make our brand stronger as it will be easier to remember and we will be known as THE “Olive” nationwide.

Do you think that operating on a premium .COM domain name is important for Olive to stand out from competitors in the industry?

Our top competitors have .com domain names that are very easy to remember and are supported by strong marketing efforts. Being a strong competitor, we needed to have an easy domain name to find and remember.

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I need to discuss the domain I own!

Thanks to Paul for taking part in our On the Record series. Olive has already launched its new commercial featuring Olive.com, which can be viewed on YouTube. You can follow Olive’s brand on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram at @OliveCoverage.

These responses have been edited for clarity.