Adotas

Where media buyers start online

Featured Author

Founder and CEO of ABCNamebank, Naseem Javed is recognized as a world authority on global naming complexities. He is currently helping corporations on ICANN’s new gTLD cyber-platforms and lecturing on corporate nomenclature frontiers and global cyber-branding. Naseem is also conducting series of exclusive webinars on how to evaluate and achieve iconic name status worldwide.

More articles by Naseem Javed





Features

gTLD: Netflix and the Difference Between a Pyramid and a Root

Written on
Oct 11, 2011 
Author
Naseem Javed  |
Share
gTLD: Netflix and the Difference Between a Pyramid and a Root

ADOTAS – Superstar movie-rental giant Netflix rapidly graduated to movie streaming and suddenly splintered the old-fashioned DVD movie rentals business and created “Qwikster,” a separate division with a name identity seemingly inspired by the likes of Twitter and Napster. When the outcry of customers reached the boardroom, the objections over account access, dual billings and having to deal with two separate unrelated name identities overwhelmed the management.

Wisdom quickly kicked in and Qwikster was withdrawn. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said on his blog, “It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs. This means no change: one website, one account, one password.”

This is a good move indeed as Qwikster would have become a major name identity liability and a branding nightmare. Creating divisional identities, spinoffs of operations and divestures all require very delicate understanding of corporate nomenclature. It’s easy to find names quickly but disrupt perceptions– the human nature side of “name-usability” is very complex. Here is one major new emerging front that will topple the traditional thinking on market domination via name identities.

A typical domain name is a “pyramid”: for example, under www.ibm.com, the entire universe of IBM is parked. Their history, products and services, management, global offices, investment, shareholders, stock-related information, human resource, public relations, community services, staffing and hundreds of other items all nicely arranged like a pyramid. There is only one domain name www.ibm.com and it belongs to IBM. Great, so, what’s so special about it, as millions of other companies are doing the same thing? Hold this thought for a minute.

The ICANN’s gTLD brand is a “root”: now say IBM acquires “.ibm” and it selectively creates a series of sub-domain cyber brands: mainframe.ibm, cloud.ibm, delhi.ibm, hr.ibm, or shares.ibm. The variations are endless and as a global player, they could offer geo-socio-cyber-contact-sub-domain-connections all over the world. As a root, the gTLD name brand grows into a tree with branches and provides a more flexible and user-friendly setup.

If mass customer acquisitions and out reaching cyber customer touch are the next challenges for the ever-expanding universe of online users, then such Roots play a far more advanced game then the traditional single domain name stacked up with contents like a pyramid.

The management has two options: either just keep the pyramid and keep adding to its solo structure, or start thinking about the free flow growth of a root into many different branches to strategically interlink or uplink and become a large tree. In either case performance will be dramatically different.

The naysayers all over the world are already blasting ICANN over this gTLD program, but their fears have more to do with lack of understanding and readily available skills to adjust to this global shift towards large-scale cyber identity management.

The subject gets even more complex for global entities when there are too many sub-divisions within too many sub-brands, each with splintered name identity already polluting the market place and that’s where proper rules have be applied to harmonize corporate nomenclature.

What would have happened if the gTLD “.netflix” existed? Would “stream.netfilx” and “dvd.netflix” have provided highly unified single-brand-name equity with the same back-end? Similarly would they have offered country specific identities like canada.netflix? They are smart and they will decide the right thing.

Today, each serious marketer has to come to grips and selective abandon the traditional education over mastering the new emerging platforms because the next battle is all about “mass customer acquisition” and “mass customer touchpoints” achieved by practicing “market domination via name identity.” At this level of complexity, this topic is neither discussed at universities nor MBA programs anywhere in the world — hence, part of the reason there is so much fear about the new platform.

The ICANN begins accepting gTLD brand applications on Jan. 12, 2012.





Reader Comments.

No comments yet

Leave a Comment

Add a comment

Tags: , , , , , and
Article Sponsor

More Features


  • Once Facebook goes public, what's the most important thing it'll need to do in order to live up the expectations of its real value?

    View Results

    Loading ... Loading ...

Latest News

News Archive

Spotlight

Sponsormob Leads the Way Into RTB for MobileADOTAS – For more than half a decade, Berlin-based tech firm Sponsormob has remained relevant in an industry characterized by [...] more...

Adotas Partnership