.BRAND REGISTRIES
Almost a year later, however, there is no sign of .google and .youtube is nowhere to be seen.
Along with Google, Microsoſt, KPMG and Gucci are just some of the other notable companies to have applied for, but not used, their .brands. Of those that have launched, insurance group AXA is the biggest, although the bland home page at .axa implies a work in progress and any innovation is leſt to the imagination.
“We’re probably not going to see much innovation at the start; people are going to be cautious and dip their toe in the water,” says Marc Trachtenberg, shareholder at Greenberg Traurig LLP and a fellow of the Brand Registry Group (BRG), which represents .brand registries. He says companies may wait at least two years before launching their .brands.
Why is this? Many
brands are taking a ‘wait-and-see’
approach, says Elisa Cooper, senior director of product marketing at MarkMonitor, a brand protection company. Tey are biding their time until one of the “big” internet players makes its move, she says.
28 Trademarks & Brands Online
Another reason is simply a lack of knowledge. Even within companies that applied for a .brand, people are not necessarily clued up on domain names, let alone the new gTLD programme, particularly if there has been staff turnover in the time since the application was filed.
In addition, and perhaps most importantly, says Cooper, there is still a lack of communication between a brand’s intellectual property group, which probably applied for the gTLD, and its internal marketing team, which has to make some hard decisions and possibly make a “massive” investment in the new domain.
“In many cases they do not have a firm plan about what they’re going to do,” she says.
Tis communication will have to improve if marketing teams are going to get a good sense of what to do with their .brand. To help them decide, they need to ask themselves a number of big questions, beginning with some basics such as ‘what name is the home page going to use?’.
“Should it be ‘
home.brand’?”, asks Trachtenberg. “Tat’s not very sexy. What about ‘
index.brand’? Tat’s not very sexy either. What about ‘www.
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brand’? Tis, and other standards issues, is one of the things the BRG is looking at.”
Another question, he says, surrounds how email addresses will work at the new gTLD when a company migrates to it.
“Tere is no standard for how that will work,” Trachtenberg says. “You don’t want to migrate your employees to something that’s not recognised.
“If you migrate your brand,” he adds, “what do you do about page rank and other search engine optimisation aspects of your existing websites? Your current sites probably have high search engine ranks, so will you still be able to capture that rank?”
Further, he asks: “Who can register names? Re-sellers? Affiliates? What type of control do you put on those entities? Tat is definitely a challenge.”
One possible answer to the question of control is setting strong internal policies, says Trachtenberg, in order to prevent registrants (whoever they are) from having second-level domains that are identical or similar to another company’s trademarks.
www.trademarksandbrandsonline.com
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