Pizza Hut could slowly be rebranding as The Hut, according to several reports in marketing and media publications. The company has been adding pasta dishes to its menu lately, which also caused it to rebrand as Pasta Hut in the UK in 2008 (a decision I haven’t been fond of, either), so I can understand why Pizza Hut feels the need to change its name, in addition to appealing to a younger audience often referring to Pizza Hut simply as “The Hut”. However, Pizza Hut has been an established brand name for so many years, making me think dropping that name could alienate some customers. In addition to that, I also doubt that this is the right time for a rebranding.

Moreover, the company has again forgotten about buying its different company names as domain names prior to the announcement. As of this writing, TheHut.com is owned by an ecommerce company in the UK, and Hut.com is under whois privacy and forwarding to a parked page. The hyphenated version The-Hut.com is parked as well and marked as for sale. Pizza Hut/The Hut better be ready to fork out a lot of money if it wants to acquire these domain names now that everybody knows about the rebranding. Heck, it hasn’t even acquired any other variations, yet. Both Hut.net and TheHut.net are owned by iREIT (registered in 2000 and 2001 respectively). Hut.co.uk forwards to a custom parked page and TheHut.co.uk is owned by the aforementioned TheHut.com group. And don’t get me started on Pizza.com, which Pizza Hut should have bought in 2008, but which was later sold to National A-1.

I’m scratching my head over how a company with such a well-known brand could want to drop it basically overnight. The rebranding is even more risky given today’s unstable economic environment, where a valuable brand name, which is recognized by customers all around the world, is something you can fall back on. Anyway, Pizza Hut has already tested new, red pizza delivery boxes with the name “The Hut” on them, according to a BrandWeek interview with Pizza Hut CMO Brian Niccol. But it’s also important to say that no Pizza Hut spokesperson has officially confirmed the rebranding, yet, so maybe they will decide against it in the end given the mixed media coverage.

(Hat tip to Owen Frager.)