What's in a name? For some, it's everything. Donald Trump, author and television personality, is best known for his real estate business, The Trump Organization. Considered by many a publicity hound and not known for shying away from the limelight, Trump plasters his name across all of his businesses and many of his real estate holdings: Trump Towers, Trump Plaza, etc.
Recently Trump sued Trump Entertainment Properties to have his name taken off two Atlantic City casinos that he no longer controls and says doesn't represent him at the quality and style to which his brand belongs. For Donald Trump, his name is his brand and critically important.
This is an example of a name being chosen because of the brand experience associated with it. On the other hand, Exxon is a name that came about from avoiding things rather than representing something. Created by its predecessor, Esso (Standard Oil of New Jersey) in the early 1970s, its name evolution included variations that were dismissed for different reasons: Enco because it was too similar to a Japanese slang term enko, meaning, "stalled car," perhaps not great for the name of an oil and gasoline company. Another variation was based solely on the original spelling, Exon, the same as the sitting governor of Nebraska, James Exon. Hence the second "X" was added.
Today, second in importance to a company's name is the URL chosen for its website. Large corporations typically use their names for their websites—because their names are so well known and they can afford to buy those domains if another party owns them.
Smaller companies' often choose a name that is more descriptive of what they do than who they are. Many include variations of the words "insurance," "agency" or "broker."
A recent release by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers of more than 300 new top-level domain extensions (i.e., .com or .net) has flooded the market. Visit http://data.iana.org/TLD for a list of what's available.
Two extensions, .agency and .insure, make sense for an insurance agency to consider. Imagine an agency whose URL is BestInsuranceAgency.com (which currently doesn't exist) but realizes that perhaps that's not the best way to represent themselves on the Internet. Maybe they want to emphasize pricing, service or choice so, they now can pick BestPrices.insure or BestInsuranceService.agency.
I've created a number of landing pages for different business purposes for my business and online marketing. For many I purchased a relevant domain name from GoDaddy for around $10 per year. Of the 20 or so different names, 95% of them end in .com and generally the .info and .biz domains I bought were obtained because the .com was already taken or was offered for a price I wasn't willing to pay.
A recent study by OpenMatters and Deloitte & Touche LLP finds that financial statements no longer reflect much of an agency's value. A review of 40 years of data from Standard & Poor's 500 index companies shows that investors place a higher value on organizations that adopt emerging technologies, such as social media, mobile and the Internet of everything.
Barry Libert, chairman and CEO of OpenMatters and senior fellow of the SEI Center at Wharton, says companies "with business models that embrace today's technologies and emphasize intangible assets—customer, human and intellectual property—are commanding higher valuations." So if you consider the Internet or mobile technologies as optional, you could be limiting your agency's future value.
Beyond .com
The flip side of all of this choice for domain extensions is that people don't generally consider anything other than .com. Most of these extensions will remain in the realm of novelty. Consider .biz, created in 2001 as a potential identifier for corporations, but never gained credibility. Similar things can be said about .info. When was the last time you visited a website with a URL that ended in either .biz or .info?
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