Don't let your Brand get Lost

When the concept of markets originated, the focus was local. The market was driven by scarcity and businesses were limited by distance; customers had to be near them to buy from them. A business that set up on the "Main Street", the physical location where the most customers were, was far more likely to succeed than a similar business on a side street. Put simply it was harder to convince customers to travel down a side street to find them; while businesses on Main Street flourished.

In modern times the market exists virtually; online. Markets now operate on abundance and businesses can access any customer that can get online. In place of storefronts, patrons now go to websites and the address of that website is the virtual location where customers must go to find them. This address is the domain name a brand uses.

Physical locations were measured by foot traffic; how many patrons walked past a location. It was easy to get people to walk by Main Street; but to get them off Main Street required multiple signs advertising a different location and pointing the way. All those signs were expensive and didn't always work.

Today locations are measured by perception; how does a patron feel about the company based on their "location" - their domain. For every brand there exists only one ideal domain name; this is the shortest, brand matching, dot COM domain. Failing to be on the ideal domain for any brand risks be viewed as "less than" compared to competitor brands. And it takes marketing spend to overcome that customer hesitancy.

Domains with a dot COM are over 33% more memorable than URLs with any other top level domain (TLD). When people try to remember a URL they are 3.8 times more likely to assume it ends in dot COM than any other TLD. The dot COM TLD was the #1 most trusted domain. These statistically significant results are from a 2022 experiment with 1,500 subjects. (1)

People know that top tier brands are always on their ideal domains. Fortune 500 companies and top brands on global stock exchanges are always on their ideal domain. Failing to be on the ideal domain gives a perception of "less than". 

• This makes it more expensive to acquire customers because they don't instantly trust the brand. 
• This leads to higher customer churn because it is easier to lure away customers as a more trustworthy brand. 
• This lowers the quality of the software, the widget, the product, the service - whatever you do AND the team selling & supporting it; top tier employees work for top tier brands and your HR won't be able to recruit them. 
• This makes raising funds harder because some investors will note you don't have your ideal domain and think you don't know how to run. atop tier brand OR don't care enough to do so - that will end their diligence.

It doesn't matter if your company is B2B, B2C or an App. You are always engaging people. That is why 98% of all global StartUp Unicorns are on their ideal domain. Further even 87% of the most downloaded Apps operate on their ideal domain name. These statistics prove you can be successful without your ideal domain; but logic dictates the odds are much better with your ideal domain than without.