A good question to ask yourself, when contemplating your website’s “brand name” and whether to choose a “to branded website domain name” versus “the domain name that is the generic name of the product or service you plan to offer” is “What is our budget for building and maintaining the ‘meaning of the branded domain’ TO MAKE IT MEAN what the keyword domain ‘already means’”?
How much do you have to spend or plan to spend to help make the connection, in consumer’s minds, that your branded or catchy domain name – say FizzleBip.tld – is the name of a website where people can get mortgage quotes?
FizzleBip.tld or MortgageQuotes.tld?
When contemplation “our brand” remember that “brand” stands for much more than a name or symbol. The brand-name or brand-symbol are merely references to or associated with the user’s experience OF your product or service. In other words, brand exists in the experience. The brand-name or brand-symbol are merely associates, not executives, so to speak. Experience -> execution, making of the brand experience. Words or symbols -> associations.
People labor about “branded domains” when I think they really should be laboring and focusing on “user experience”. Get the experience of the the product or service or website as an experience right and, if you do, you can use an onion or tomato or potato sack as your “brand image”. Likewise, if you have the money and talent to get image hosting as a service working and you could call your service Flickr and it will work, at least until the money runs out for free image hosting.
When it comes to choosing a brandable domain versus a generic descriptive domain for a website you need to ask “How much money, time and effort will it take to associate the branded domain with the service/goods?” That will be a function of the industry’s competitiveness, amongst other factors. It can be a very large sum/cost. Also, the cost of branding efforts may be perpetual if you are a small to mid-size player.
When you have the industry’s generic name as a website name the costs of “making the association” likely drop significantly. That cost or savings needs to measured against the cost of acquiring the generic, descriptive domain.
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