Pharmaceutical companies marketing new drugs often face a unique problem—product names that have more consonants than an episode of Sesame Street. Many of these drug names are hard to pronounce and even harder to spell. For many companies this isn’t a problem until it comes to setting up a website to direct customers to for more information. If the average customer can’t say or spell your product, then finding it on the web could be impossible.
That’s why some innovative marketers have found a different approach—identifying and establishing a common, general website domain that focuses on what the consumer is looking for.
A recent example of this is ShinglesInfo.com. Instead of sending customers to Merck’s massive corporate site, or asking them to try and remember the name of their shingles vaccine, Zostavax, the marketers behind the drug found the perfect domain name. Broadcast and print ads can now point people to the simple and easy-to-remember domain ShinglesInfo.com, a site that shares information on the disease without explicitly stating that it is a website sponsored by Merck. Drug information is not pushed on the consumer; it’s more of a resource for people to learn more about the disease. Eventually, when a consumer decides... Read more
Tagged 'Domain Name' 
Seeing the New Domain Forest through the Trees
There’s been a lot of noise recently about a major change in the structure of the Internet which could have a big impact on online marketers -- the decision to allow new domain extensions. With so much chatter both on and offline, it’s worth taking a step back and a practical look at what’s happening in order to make sure your company doesn’t get caught up in the commotion.
Amazon’s Investment from A.co to Z.co
News broke recently that Amazon expanded its domain portfolio with a substantial purchase of four new domain names: A.co, K.co, Z.co and Cloud.co. No typo there; the names are all part of the .co extension, not .com. Although the company hasn’t announced its plan for the new domains, speculations are that they represent different parts of its business: Amazon, Kindle, Zappos and its Web Services business. Amazon also didn’t reveal how much it paid for the domain names, but you may recall that Overstock.com bought O.co for $350,000 last year. So why did Amazon.com choose to make this unusual investment?
Amazon knows what it’s doing when it comes to branding. Like Overstock’s O.co, A.co is a name that can be recognized internationally without any translation needed. Not only is it brandable and memorable, but shorter names are key in the age of Twitter. Twitter itself even purchased T.co recently to create its own URL shortener. Single-character .com domain names are so in-demand that they are essentially unattainable, but the new .co extension opens up an attractive alternative. Companies with deep pockets can afford the super-premium and single character names, but .co and other recently released extensions such as .me or .tv... Read more
