Why might .brand TLDs be so important?
.brand TLDs are quite a shift from the simple brand.com model that we’re all accustomed to, but industry experts claim significant benefits both to marketers and to consumers.
These include greater flexibility in domain name selection, simplified calls to action in advertising and the ability to reduce reliance on third parties for customer acquisition such as social media or search.
However, for consumers perhaps the benefits aren’t so clear and significant education is required.
One potential benefit for consumers is that .brand TLDs offer simplified navigation which we haven’t seen in the online world since the halcyon days of Windows 2000. Back when websites had two or three navigation options each and you could find whatever you wanted within one or two clicks (assuming you knew how to get to a website that is) because websites were so much smaller.
Now even the best-designed corporate website has hundreds of products, variants, and geographic content presentation intricacies which have driven the significant growth in the use of search as the means of navigating the web.
But for large brands making this shift already, their hope is that .brand TLDs have the ability to allow us to simply add a ‘dot’ and get straight to what we want via domains such as jets.nfl or airmax.nike.
Examples of .brand TLDs
There are nearly 600 .brand TLDs and while many have not yet begun to use them in major advertising campaigns, there are numerous live examples on the web.
There are a number of household brands like Canon, which announced in May 2016 the launch of its own TLD, transitioning its existing “www.canon.com” domain to “global.canon”. Similarly showing technical leadership is European banking giant Barclays Bank which transitioned from www.barclays.com to www.home.barclays.
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