I just read a really interesting article in fashion trade bible Women's Wear Daily, which outlined a new trend among luxury brands: buying domain names. Brands like Chanel and beauty behemoth L'Oreal are apparently spending upwards of $185,000 to register for Internet domain name endings like .chanel and .loreal. L'Oreal has even taken things a step further by applying to register generic domains like .skin, .hair and .makeup. It's interesting stuff and really makes one thing about just out boundless the Internet really is. Check out the whole article here:
http://www.wwd.com/media-news/digital/luxe-brands-register-for-domain-names-5962016
As WWD states, a lot of brands are doing this for defensive reasons (IE so that someone else won't register and hold the domain hostage. Or worse, create a counterfeit site). But, there are also an endless number of creative and cleaver marketing possibilities wrapped up in this, as well. I'm curious to see if this sizable expenditure pays off for these luxury brands and what, if any, impact this will have on e-retail and the Internet as a whole...
1 comment:
Woah, this is crazy! The possibilities are endless with the introduction of generic top level domains. Will this send us back to the days when people were scooping up standard addresses like www.sleep.com in the hopes of striking it rich by selling the address to a mattress company? Or is this introducing a whole new realm of complexity? I can understand a brand name domain, but how popular will the generic top level domains REALLY become? Like the Dewey decimal system in the library, the current coding of .com, .org, .gov, .us, .uk, etc makes it very easy to identify and categorize the information online. The new domain name options have caused another change, er--evolution, in digital life. It will be interesting to see how this one plays out and if it was predictable or takes everyone by surprise. At the moment, I'm in the camp of people over-reacting and jumping on the band wagon b/c it's the "cool" thing to do to scoop up any and every domain ending associated with your brand.
Post a Comment