With the Super Bowl literally around the corner (it’s this Sunday), one thing that I thought might be an interesting discussion is the annual tradition of millions of Americans have besides watching the actual game – it’s about the commercials. What television ad will raise eyebrows, cause people to gag, or perhaps remember for the next 365 days until the next Super Bowl. Sure, there will be commercials for perhaps the staple companies, like Budweiser or Pepsi and maybe Tostitos, but frankly, how many of us actually recall most of the ads we saw a week after the game? This is something to consider when you’re trying to come up with a brand.
Earlier today, I heard a thought-provoking scenario: is it better to have a better brand before a product or a better product before an established brand? The answer is the latter – work on creating a great product and then work on your brand. For more companies, if you’re going to recall a company with a great brand, you’ve probably paid more attention to their identity instead of what they actually are producing or servicing. I suppose it’s like a guy going out with a girl – is it better for the guy to pay attention to his hair or the girl?
Going back to the Super Bowl, in a study done by Markitecture, the percentage of people who actually remembered any of the Super Bowl commercials was around 9%. After spending millions of dollars, is that something that you want to leave with? In the table above, Markitecture looked at the awareness factor with respect to the commercials that aired during the 2007 game. Obviously the companies that continuously advertise each year would gain more awareness (e.g. Budweiser, Bud Light, Coca-Cola, etc), but for smaller companies like Gillette, GAP, Macy’s, etc, do you think spending $2.6MM on a 30 second ad was the best use of their resources? If you have a good product and brand, it will surely stand out above all the noise and people will know what it is you do and what you produce.
It’s not necessary for you to go and spend millions of dollars just to have your brand be noticed. It all starts with making sure people can FIND your brand to begin with. Are you getting the word out about your brand through your friends and contacts? How about through traditional means? Actually…let’s back that up. Have you first secured your own web domain? No? Why not? Do you know that your web domain is basically your home on the web? It’s how people will find you on the Internet. If not, you better go make sure that it is – just because someone has it before you does not mean that they’re required to “give up the goods” just because you ask – they bought it first, fair and square. So if you don’t want someone to poach your domain, you better go purchase it right now.
Here’s some tips for you to understand how to pick a domain:
- Make your domain/web address your company name – it’s definitely for brand consistency, but also to tie it all together…when you tell me the name of your company, I’m going to assume that it’s also your web address.
- Try and purchase a .com domain extension, not a .info domain – a majority of Internet users will automatically assume a .com extension. Each extension (e.g. .org, .net.) is used for specific types of companies and organizations – this is really crucial when choosing one and dealing with tax purposes.
- Don’t just purchase one domain – if you’re serious about your brand, you’re going to want to protect it from squatters. Make sure you get all the major variations of your domain, including extensions. So domain.com, domain.org and domain.net are at least the ones you should invest in.
- If you have any slogans or mottos that you want to protect as well, you might also be interested in purchasing those domains as well.
- Your domain is also a key factor in search results – search engines use your web address as a large component on assessing your relevancy and position on search engine results.
- Variations of a domain can be used against you – during one of the presidential campaigns, then-President Bush’s team bought all the positive sounding domains and also the negative ones so that they couldn’t be used to spread negative news or info about him or his running mate. If your brand is facing such a crisis, this might be something to be proactively looking into.
Website domains are becoming hot commodities in the Internet age. If you’re thinking your company will be making it big, you might want to secure the domains as quickly as possible. To help you get started, Network Solutions has a couple of discount codes to help you secure your domain:
- $6.99 domain purchase for social media has a new coupon code: DOMSOCIAL1
- $6.99 domain transfer for social media has a new coupon code: DOMSOCIAL3
So go buy your domains now!
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