Truly Deeply/Madly

Flick­ing through the news today I came across a post on John Gruber’s Dar­ing Fire­ball blog. Canon is begin­ning the process of acqui­si­tion for the .canon top level domain name. Based on the new generic Top Level Domain (gTDL) reg­is­tra­tion sys­tem which will allow a com­pany name, brand name, geo­graphic region, or ser­vice type to be used as a gTLD within web­site and e-mail addresses. The new sys­tem is expected to be approved in the sec­ond half of next year from then on you can expect to see all the major inter­na­tional brands doing the same. It wont be long before we see .nike, .coke and .apple

Whilst hav­ing your own, on-brand gTDL will soon become the must-have brand device, it wont come cheap. It’ll cost around US$200k and up to set up a gTLD. If the name is dis­puted it starts get­ting really expen­sive or, heaven for­bid,  it’s a con­tested name with sev­eral inter­ested par­ties, think .cars, .music, etc. then it involves a bid­ding process. Com­pa­nies could end up spend­ing multi-millions to acquire a gTDL.

It’s all very new and excit­ing, but the real ques­tion is; will it be worth it for brands? It’s prob­a­bly a no brainer for brands like Canon, Nike and Coke. Rel­a­tive to the value of the Coke brand,the gTDL invest­ment makes sense, from the per­spec­tive of pro­tec­tion alone. But like every brand expres­sion you have to ask how much can you lever­age it. Is there a bet­ter way to lever­age a cou­ple of hun­dred k on your brand? Ask your­self this ques­tion: How often do you type in a URL? or do you just type a name into Google. The answer to those curly ques­tions will be a good start­ing point to estab­lish­ing whether you and your brand should jump aboard the gTDL train.

If you’d like to talk about the best way to lever­age your bud­get for brand build­ing, or the brave, new world of brands on-line give us a call

Derek Car­roll
Direc­tor of Design

Tags: .cannon, Apple, Brand Agency, Brand Design, brand designer Melbourne, Brand Experience, Brand Expression, brand investment, Brand Strategy, brand value, brand-designers-Melbourne, brand-reputation, Coke, Corporate Image, Daring Fireball, generic Top Level Domain, Graphic Design Melbourne, gTLD, international brands, John Gruber, Melbourne Brand Strategy, Nike, on-line brands

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Brand Agency, Brand Design, Brand Strategy, Corporate Image, Graphic Design Melbourne. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.