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domain naming
This page deals with domain naming as an aspect of marketing.
It covers -
Fads
in product and corporate naming are highlighted here.
introduction
During the dot-com boom it was common to see claims that
a domain name was a 'killer
app' for successful e-commerce: the silver bullet that
made the difference between success and failure.
A slew of businesses - many of them transient - appeared
to create the magic names or to sell 'pre-registered'
names to site operators (and to speculators). That activity
was fostered by uncritical media coverage, hype by gurus
and the inexperience of many internet users, who for example
treated domain names as a subject
search.
Some businesses sought to bypass the "name problem",
for example by paying for higher rankings on search engine
listings or by licensing keynames - preferred placement
- from dominant internet service providers such as AOL
and browser developers.
(The latter came to grief when Microsoft's IE browser
gained over 90% of the market in most countries.)
Five years after the boom there's less credence in magic
bullet solutions to online resource identification.
Users can now expect to identify domains through URLS
in newspapers, on television, business cards and outdoor
advertising rather than deconstructing the domain name
system (DNS) or assuming that a generic name is the only
or primary address on the net for a particular product/activity.
Recognition of the www.amazon.com address is thus considerably
greater than that of generic domains such as www.book.com,
books.com or bookshop.com.
That change reflects normalisation of the online population,
which has greater experience simply through greater exposure
to the net and in advanced economies increasingly reflects
the demographics of the overall population. It reflects
the greater prominence of search
engines such as Google. And for many marketers - or
merely commentators - it reflects the end of what we have
elsewhere characterised
as internet exceptionalism, claims that the net is so
qualitatively and quantitatively different that traditional
marketing insights (and regulatory or other rules) simply
do not apply.
A result is growing acceptance that online - as offline
- an appropriate name can be a distinct advantage but
must form part of a wider and sustained marketing strategy
and is not a substitute for marketing. Contrary to the
often glib Martha Pepper, although "brand names were
born as a substitute for relationships people couldn't
have with companies" it is clear that
- branding
is more than a funky URL and that
- the
relationship is more subtle than simply finding a particular
address in cyberspace (the address and facade might
be great but if the service is lousy you're unlikely
to go back).
That acceptance has seen marketing-savvy major corporations
relinquish many generic domain names. For example US consumer
products giant wrote off investment of several hundred
thousand dollars in domains such as flu.com and cleaner.com,
announcing that its strategy would now be built around
its brand names.
It has also seen the demise of many online domain naming
businesses, particularly those with a 'get rich quick'
flavour, and a slump in pre-registered domain name sales
(with many names not being renewed). And most pundits
have found new areas for pontification.
At the same time there has been increasing awareness among
business (and among service sectors such as lawyers) and
among the courts and regulators about the use of trademark/brand
protection mechanisms such as Uniform Dispute Resolution
Procedure (UDRP), the
AntiCybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA)
in the US and the auDRP
in Australia.
That has weakened claims that businesses or other entities
must engage in large-scale defensive registration (ie
must pre-emptively acquire as many variants as possible,
in as many ccTLDs and
gTLDs as possible, of their chosen domain). About.com
for example supposedly spent US$500,000 in 2000 acquiring
over 4,000 domain names as part of a stealth effort to
control the About.com domain and all possible combinations.
We've highlighted writing about domain name disputes here.
The following paragraphs point to disagreement about name
principles, highlight studies and note some players in
the domain naming industry.
principles
In our discussion
of domain name valuation we have highlighted conflicting
principles - in practice contradictory assertions - about
"what makes a good domain name".
Those principles encompass dictates on such matters as
the length of the name, its "musicality", whether
it has "power letters" such as z and
x, whether it has power prefixes such as e-
or i-, and its appropriateness for particular
markets.
It is clear that many consumers find very long domain
names offputting, simply because they are less memorable
or more likely to be mistyped. (That is a particular concern
in labelling files within a domain, a matter where many
users do expect to be able to find a a resource by deconstructing
parts of the address.) A short name per se is
not a recipe for success and there are indications that
a name longer than three or four characters is more effective.
Our axiom is that, apart from existing brand/institutional
names going online, a domain name is what you make of
it: how you promote it, what corporate values and performance
it embodies. The reason that amazon
for example = books in the mental marketspace of many
consumers (rather than the snappier nile.com, tiber.com,
volga.com or cam.com) is because it has been effectively
and expensively promoted and serviced.
Another is to be conscious, if you are aiming for markets
outside Australia and the US, that not every uses English
as their first language: a domain name may have quite
a different meaning in Spanish, Portuguese or another
language. We have highlighted some cross-cultural concerns
below and in the Design
guide elsewhere on this site
naming and branding
Product and brand naming - dignified by some practitioners
as onomastics - has an extensive literature. Unfortunately,
much of the empirical research is of limited application
and general studies of principle and practice tend to
feature significant subjectivity.
It is unclear that much branding literature has moved
on from the days when US marketing pioneer Edward Bernays
adopted the theories of his uncle Dr Sigmund Freud to
sell nylons, cigarettes and soap.
High profile Naseem Javed, author of Naming for Power:
Creating Successful Names for the Business World (New
York: Linkbridge 2000), claims
that
A
corporate name, at best, is an 'outcry' from the deep
bottom of the corporation in search of attention and
in pursuit of fame and glory. Whether you read a name
in a column, see it in the phone book, hear it on the
radio, or come across it on the web, it is always a
desperate cry for something.
There
is a lot of crying online but there are few major studies
of domain naming principles and consumer responses: most
work features as passing comments or an awkward chapter
in larger studies of online branding and e-marketing.
Examples include Brand Building On The Internet
(South Yarra: Hardie Grant 2000) by Martin Lindstrom &
Tim Andersen and Advertising on the Internet (New
York: Wiley 1999) by Robin Zeff & Brad Aronson. For us
there is more bite in the 2007 An Investigation of
Global versus Local Online Branding (PDF)
by Jamie Murphy & Arno Scharl, the 2007 Branding
on the Web: Evolving Domain Name Usage by Malaysian Hotels
(PDF)
by Murphy & Noor Hashim and 2003 The Use of Domain
Names in E-Branding by the World's Top Brands (PDF)
by Murphy, Laura Raffa & Richard Mizerski.
A perspective is provided by Allan Metcalf's Predicting
New Words: The Secrets of Their Success (New York:
Houghton Mifflin 2002) and Alex Frankel's Wordcraft:
The Art of Turning Little Words into Big Business
(New York: Crown 2004).
We have highlighted particular sources in our discussion
of domain name valuation, for example the legal Domain
Names: a Practical Guide (London: Tolley 2002) by
Simon Halberstam, Joanne Brook & Jonathan Turner and
the accounting Valuation of Intellectual Property &
Intangible Assets (New York: Wiley 2000) by Gordon
Smith & Russell Parr.
The corporate name-generation business was nicely captured
in a wry 1999 Salon article.
Earlier pages of this guide have noted particular branding
initiatives; some of the leading practitioners are -
NameLab
Master
Mcneil
Landor
Associates
Metaphor
Name Consultants
Further
down the foodchain various specialists offer a range of
naming services. Namestormers for example offers
software "to Help You Generate Unusual and Appropriate
Names Quickly" (with results such as iPen - you guessed
it, for an electronic pen - and Itzakadoozie for an "ice
cream treat").
perspectives
A perspective is provided by Tim Denton's 2001 report
on The Federal Corporate Name-Granting in the Age of
the Internet (PDF),
considering the extent to which Canada's national corporate
registration regime needs to be changed to meet challenges
posed by domain naming.
Another is provided by The Game of the Name: Valuation
Effects of Name Changes in a Market Downturn, a 2002
paper (PDF)
by P. Raghvendra Rau, Ajay Patel, Igor Osobov, Ajay Khorana
& Michael Cooper. Adding a 'dot-com' to a company
name initially boosted stock market values; after the
collapse of the bubble removal of the 'dot-com' from the
name was one way to reverse slumping stock prices.
A third is offered by Stanley Lieberson's A Matter
of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change
(New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2000).
Psychologists Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer reported
in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during
2006 that an easily pronounceable company name or stock
ticker symbol may be a significant factor in short-term
increases in stock price. Studies cited in the report
indicated that people more often judge easily processed
information to be "true, likable, familiar and convincing"
than more complex data.
Alter cautioned that
Name fluency is only one factor of many that influence
stock prices. Our results suggest that stock price models
will benefit from taking into account psychological
factors like name fluency - not that name fluency is
the only or most important determinant of stock prices.
Bizarrely,
there is a fad in the US about using 'baby name consultants'
in selecting names for human offspring.
Supposedly 130 baby-name books were published between
1990 and 2005. Child naming sites have also proliferated.
BabyNames.com supposedly gets around 1.2 million unique
visitors per month, some in search of its custom naming
service (12 suggestions for a mere US$35) or half-hour
phone consulting sessions for US$95). Some of its over
100 competitors offer searchable databases, polls and
private consultations.
Perhaps there is an opening for an enterprise naming dogs,
cats, axolotls and other companion creatures?
forbidden names?
It is common to see claims that domain naming is restricted
only by the registrant's imagination. In practice there
is less scope to run wild.
Very long domain names (like very long URLs for individual
web pages) are generally considered too long to be memorable
or accurately transcribed. Registration of names that
feature another entity's trademark or corporate name -
or the name of prominent individuals - is likely to result
in domain name disputes
on the basis of trademark
or personality rights infringements.
And many ccTLDs feature prohibitions on the registration
of particular words or classes of words.
There are no global standards, both because of disagreement
about what might be offensive - a matter highlighted in
our Censorship guide
- and more pragmatically because forbidding expletives
in all languages would be unwieldy.
Australian intellectual property law
and other legislation, for example, places restrictions
on commercial use of words such as ANZAC, University and
Olympic. Those restrictions are reflected in the policy
of dot-au domain administrator auDA.
Norway's Domain Name Policy for .No (Policy)
similarly prohibits particular functional and political
terms such as whois, porno, kongen, prinsessa, kronprinsessen
and stortingspresident.
Registrars in some countries are broadly precluded by
national law from refusing to register a domain name,
eg on the grounds of free speech. In the US there has
been disagreement about informal restrictions on registration
of obscene names, with differing practice among competing
registrars and claims (eg PDF)
that restrictions deprive a registrant of a right to free
speech, breach due process under federal and state law,
and result in a financial loss because the names have
a commercial value exploited by competitors able to register
them elsewhere.
Attention has centred on the so-called Pacifica Seven,
seven words that major US broadcasting networks (with
the sanction of the Federal Communications Commission)
do not allow on air in prime time since the 1978 Pacifica
case, and on automated filters operated by registrars
that exclude terms such as shitakemushrooms. A range of
terms to describe boldily functions or commemorate figures
of infamy (eg hitler.org)
have been registered in dot-com and other TLDs. Automated
registration (and registrar responsibility for names rather
than site content) mean that names such as childpornsite.com
and underagenymphos.com have been registered.
It is interesting to note that in ruling against claims
that individual registrars have violated fundamental rights
by refusing to register particular words or word combinations
the US District Court for the Eastern District of New
York noted that although the Department of Defense was
instrumental in development of the net, the net was not
"by any stretch of the imagination a traditional and exclusive
public function".
In Australia there is some uncertainty about restrictions
on registration of words that are generally considered
to be offensive because of obscenity, might come under
vilification legislation or feature religious figures/concepts.
A major registrar thus commented to us that it
reserves
the right to refuse to register any domain name for
any reason, but we have not yet, and don't really expect
to ever reject a domain due to the words in it. We strongly
believe in free speech and will try to not impose any
restrictions on what domain names people try to register.
cross-cultural questions
Words
and phrases often have a different formal or colloquial
meaning in another language, or have unintended associations.
That's worth bearing in mind when considering domain names
and brand names that may cross cultures.
There have been no major studies of cross-cultural 'domain
name bloopers' but instances of 'advertising bloopers'
are suggestive.
In November 2003 food group Sharwoods launched a range
of "deliciously rich" sauces based on "a
traditional northern Indian method of cooking" that
would "change the way consumers make curry".
Alas, after committing £6 million for television
promotion of its Bundh sauces it discovered that
'bundh' is Punjabi for the derriere.
KFC's "finger lickin' good" slogan was mistranslated
in China as "eat your fingers off", something
that consumers might be inclined to do after encountering
"Pepsi brings you back to life" mistranslated
as "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave".
Competitor Coca-Cola initially used the homophone Ke-kou-ke-la,
variously interpreted as "bite the wax tadpole"
and "female horse stuffed with wax". Coke shifted
to up Ko-kou-ko-le, ie "happiness in the mouth".
In Mexico the softdrink Fresca collided with
local slang for Lesbian.
Translations in Latin American markets seem to have been
particularly problematical for US branders. The Ford Pinto
flopped on launch in Brazil and Portugal, supposedly because
pinto is slang for small genitals. Coors' slogan "turn
it loose" was perceived as "suffer from diarrhoea"
in Spanish. Perdue chicken's slogan "It takes a tough
man to make a tender chicken" allegedly sounds much
more interesting in Spanish as "It takes a sexually
stimulated man to make a chicken affectionate".
Marketing of Parker ballpoint pens in Mexico went off-track
when the admeisters misunderstood 'embarazar': advertisements
intended to say "It won't leak in your pocket and
embarrass you" instead proclaimed "It won't
leak in your pocket and make you pregnant."
In Germany there have been at least two name changes over
the word 'mist': the Rolls-Royce Silver Mist
range and Clairol Mist Stick curling iron alas
encountered 'mist' as German slang for manure.
Within English unfortunate choices of names have included
-
- Who
Represents celebrity agency database - www.whorepresents.com
-
software Experts Exchange - www.expertsexchange.com
- Italian
utility PowerGen - www.powergenitalia.com
- writing
implement vendor Pen Island - www.penisland.net
-
Mole Station Native Nursery - www.molestationnursery.com
Some
merely strike us as inept, for example
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