No matter how many times

[julian]

you say beds.com its just a dull word, and no matter how many times its repeated its not a brand - its a BED!!.... is this a problem with keyword, generic domains? - same with phones.com

Ask anyone where they go to buy a bed and they;ll say DFS etc, or phones4u, carphone whorehouse for a phone.

what does this actually mean?

 

[accelerator]

The reason they'll say the brand name is that it's had hundreds of thousands if not millions spent on promoting it. If you spent the same money on beds.com it would also become a brand.

If you asked me, generic domain names are highly brandable, they just need the money spent on branding and advertising them. When I have the budget, I would like to market LowPrices.co.uk properly. In the meantime, I have to rely on natural SEO, that's why I buy other generic domain names.

Rgds

 

[julian]

so its just down to mega corp's trust in being prepared to develop and brand a generic you think.

The reason they'll say the brand name is that it's had hundreds of thousands if not millions spent on promoting it. If you spent the same money on beds.com it would also become a brand.

If you asked me, generic domain names are highly brandable, they just need the money spent on branding and advertising them. When I have the budget, I would like to market LowPrices.co.uk properly. In the meantime, I have to rely on natural SEO, that's why I buy other generic domain names.

Rgds

 

[accelerator]

so its just down to mega corp's trust in being prepared to develop and brand a generic you think.

Yes. Lots of companies do understand the power of generic domains though:

http://www.ddna.com/keyword-domains/category-defining-keyword-domains

If I was a bed retailer then I would prefer beds.com or beds.co.uk to anything else.

Rgds

 

[emitind]

Think about B&Q and how they use and promote diy.com as their site.

 

[grantw]

bandq.co.uk

Band Q - that well known Latvian new age folk band

Grant

 

[accelerator]

I wonder how much of that is because bandq.com / bandq.co.uk / b-and-q.com / b-and-q.co.uk are all ugly to look at. Incidently B&Q own all four but only one resolves to content.

I agree, bandq is not a name that works well online.

I don't understand why they aren't forwarding all the other names to their main site though.

Rgds

 

[afx]

you say beds.com its just a dull word, and no matter how many times its repeated its not a brand - its a BED!!.... is this a problem with keyword, generic domains? - same with phones.com

Ask anyone where they go to buy a bed and they;ll say DFS etc, or phones4u, carphone whorehouse for a phone.

what does this actually mean?

Generics are not only about branding or vanity purchases for large corporates.

Not all generics are created equally. I don't mean in terms of their value, I mean in their suitability to best exploit a product / niche. For example if most people want to go and see a show in the west end, the majority do not type "ambassador tickets" into google, and instead type "theatre tickets". For most people looking to go the west end the brand "ambassador tickets" means nothing, despite bieng an enormously successful company.

IMO it's the bottom line that matters, owners of generic domains that are doing very well out of them couldn't care less whether they are deemed brands or not.

 

[websaway]

you say beds.com its just a dull word, and no matter how many times its repeated its not a brand - its a BED!!.... is this a problem with keyword, generic domains? - same with phones.com

Ask anyone where they go to buy a bed and they;ll say DFS etc, or phones4u, carphone whorehouse for a phone.

what does this actually mean?

Pondered this post for a while to see what you are saying and I think maybe your easily influenced by peoples views ( sorry in advance if i've got that wrong ). My response is BEDS.COM is not dull I'ts absolutely fantastic, it says it all, saves zillions on advertising and and is the ultimate for the bed industry, same I'm afraid with Phones.
Oh and I think more people would get beds from dFS and they would acquire a larger share of the beds market if they had BEDS.COM no question about the advantages of owning it only about the initial cost of acquiring it.

IMO

 

[Edwin]

There are VERY few industries where the average consumer needing to buy a product/service from that industry knows ALL the major competitors off by heart, without research. And there are even fewer instances where they've already pre-conditioned themselves to seek out just ONE solution from ONE vendor.

The fact that anyone can reel off a stream of counter-examples doesn't make my statement any less true. Very few is not the same as none!

In the majority of instances, the person looking for that product/service may either only have vaguely heard of a handful of companies within that niche (and usually it's those that have dumped big money into advertising), or won't even have come across any before.

In all those cases, owning the most obvious generic for that niche basically equates your organisation with that niche, in the mind of somebody starting their search for a solution to their problem. If you're looking for an accountant, the company that owns Accountant.co.uk has a huge advantage over its competitors, whether you're looking at the ads in the FT or Adwords or just browsing the organic SERPS. Everyone else looks like a bit of a has-been, whereas Accountant.co.uk appears more trustworthy and credible. In other words, you're no longer AN accountant, you're THE Accountant!

Always remember that most people are looking for solutions/answers - yet relatively few are looking for a specific brand to solve it.

 

[julian]

Always remember that most people are looking for solutions/answers - yet relatively few are looking for a specific brand to solve it.

What you've said here goes against all marketing and branding prinicples and consumer trends - I think its just that you want to make your generics less valuable

I would bet my sons life on the fact if you stopped a thousand "average" people in the street, of any city and said where would you go and buy a phone ONLINE now less that 1% would say phones.co.uk, mobilephones.co.uk - and if I said furniture I would say none would day furniture.com - it wouldn't even enter their head - they'd go direct to 02 or phones4u via G maybe.

No matter how many times one says furniture its a dull word and does nothing to enhance it as a brand.

Imho we as domain people who live in a world where we pin false hopes on the users ability to make the appropriate cognitive leap.

So why haven't Tropicana who want to corner the market in orange juice marketed themselves as orangejuice.com - probably because its completely useless and unbrandable.

 

[DarrenTSO]

For a lot of businesses, online is still only a small proportion of what they do. This means when they're spending money on branding, that they want something trademarkable as well as memorable. Whilst a good generic keyword domain can make SEO easier, it is not the be-all and end-all.

 

[websaway]

selling www.phones .com to a company is not like selling a concept that doesn't already exist. Phones.com or OrangeJuice.com evolved as a result of a technological revolution and now exist ( a little bit like a lump of land popping up inside a countries territorial waters, it wasn't there before but now it is ) if a company wants to deal in phones it naturally follows that that company would gain advantage if it owned that name. It doesn't necessarily corner the market ( not so much that it would cause the monopolies commision or whoever to investigate it's fairness ) it just gains an immediate edge. After purchase it can cause the name to play a larger part or smaller part in it's branding and marketing strategy, depending on the strength of it's current brand and the evolutionary state of it's development or it can use the name to simply compliment it's current brand position, or it can, just by owning it, deny it's competitors the inherent advantages the name provides.

I don't think names are a be all and end all to anything and I don't think the use of them is an - either or -situation, they are now something that exists and can be used to advantage, I rarely see them as a disadvantage.

 

[timbo85]

I think it's fair to say that generic, descriptive names like beds or phones are the antithesis of branding/marketing - ie. where you want to distinguish your company from the rest of the crowd. Remember brands are never seen in isolation - they are almost always put into context whether it be by the person telling you about the product, the ad, the business card, the website, the forum post etc etc. Having a generic word as your brand name not only limits your possibility to diversify in the future, but it also serves to dilute your 'brand' by making it just 'another tree in the forest' with the rest of the businesses using descriptive names, albeit perhaps slightly more memorable the shorter it is etc.

 

[Edwin]

Next time you drive down the motorway (as a passenger, if you're the easily distracted type) look around at how many trucks, vans and other commercial vehicles have a URL on them. I'll bet it's a lot over the course of a reasonable journey.

Now imagine how many of those URLs will be remembered "at destination" or later. Almost certainly it's going to be the ones you can absorb in seconds (i.e. you don't even need to engage the "working it out" part of your brain). Anything that exactly describes a product or service fits the bill. If you see Beds.co.uk you don't have to start thinking "Hmm, wonder what THEY're selling. You KNOW." Likewise for all offline advertising.

For many companies, even a very slight uptick in memorability for their offline marketing will bring a huge positive ROI. And of course they don't have to touch their existing website in any way - they can just 301 the easy-to-remember-because-it-says-what-it-is domain to their "branded" domain and then choose one or the other to use in ads, depending on the context and how far their prospects are from being able to click on a link and go to the site.

 

[timbo85]

Agreed Edwin on the 301 bit and to an extent on the rest, however I think a lot of people's brains work on association and in most cases, a picture of a bed next to a totally unrelated or made-up name can be even more memorable. Besides the other benefits - eg. a name can convey how a company wants to portray themselves...are they fun/corporate/young/old and people really buy into this - conciously or not.

So for me, I think a short descriptive domain name facilitates a better route to sale for the customer, but not necessarily a better basis for a 'brand name'.