Digital media has undeniably changed branding strategy for existing and emerging corporations. URL availability is a primary determinant when choosing a name, but associative naming is still important, and naturally at odds with URL availability. This has led to a new wave of word invention, nonsensical combinations and creative spellings. I have two questions about this new wave:
1.) Is it sustainable?
The limited set of URLS available make this unsustainable. The limiting factor is the availability of URLs and the huge number of squatters sitting on or bidding up valuable URL properties. A new naming schema is going to be necessary but the main obstacle has been normalizing a .com alternative. Alternative top-level domains have not been widely embraced, and a .com address is still regarded as a requirement for a successful brand.
2.) How important is the associative power of the brand name?
This is a much more fluid question, especially as the nature of products in the digital space don’t always line up with previously established industries. I would even go so far as to generalize that the names do not have to be related to core of the service. For example, Google, a creative misspelling of Googol, is entirely unrelated to the search functionality at the core of its business. Twitter, likewise has a name that has nothing to do with its core service. Another question is spelling; here I believe that the phonetics of the naming is the more important factor. As illustrated in class by the blueberries versus blueberrys finding, accuracy is not the determining factor in choosing a good name. Another factor that we discussed in class was the meta tagging of a site could be a more important tool for discovery and visiting, because it is even possible that more people use search to enter sites rather than using conventional URLs.
2 comments:
During this weekend, I came up to the same question. A friend of mine just presented to me his real estate related website idea that woukd complement his exisitng family real estate business. The concept of the site was very innovative and had many advantages to existing sites... somewhat different from what there's avaialble... We shared some ideas about how to make his product stronger and did a bit of brainstorming together.
Then he mentioned the possible brand names that had in his mind and told me that the name he wanted wass already taken... so he was negotiating with the owner of the domain to purchase the url for $60.000! And here is wherw the real discussion about branding started. The total invesment of building the site equals the amount of money to pay for the domain... so is it really worth it? How important is the fact that the domain itself has a name associated with the product you are offering...? Just looking into that industry... one of the real estate rental website leaders... StreetEasy... has a name that is no where related to rent an appartment. What does yahoo! google or expedia or kayak has to do wit what the websites are about...? In general, in branding, you can set a platform for brand building that will eventually associate your brand with the meaning of the business. That can actually makes it very unique... My recommendation was not to buy it... If you are starting a new website you might anyways run into many mistakes into the development of the site itself and understanding customer... so at an early stag of the process the actual domain is irrelevant to the set up and developing of the site learning experience in my opinion.
Very interesting comments on the limits of choosing a brand name....I wanted to add some comments concerning branding in wider terms. Nowadays the whole construction of the brand identity revolves around what results sound appealing also on the web. Especially if the web is used as one of the pricipal platforms for the launch of the product.
I am collaborating on the set up of the marketing of a luxury product. In this case the messages to be communicated to the public also needed to match the online content. Therefore to understand what will be appealing to the public we are using a joint research based on 1) target market interviews and 2) online analysis of what has shown to be effective in the past in the industry. In this case contrarily to the name of the brand, which needs to be different, from the ones already present online, the "catching" words might sound very similar to the ones that have worked in the past for other companies that operate with websites in the same sector. The question is: will this help the launch of the product or will it be a disadvantage, since it will limit the capacity of differenciating our product from the preexisting ones?
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