Registration of a Domain - Method of Brand Protection?
Johnson & Johnson, the world s biggest maker of health care products, recently bought and registered a number of disparaging Internet domain names, so-called "negative" domain names, such as, deathbypatch.com and orthoevrakills.com. The company decided to take such action in order to protect its new production line Ortho Evra (birth control patch) that was linked to blood clots in women. J&J faced numerous personal injury suits around the United States over the patch and while the case was still being investigated, J&J took some defensive steps to minimise the impact of negative press. These steps included buying domain names and purchasing top five key words about the patch on search engines run by Google and Yahoo. This is a standard business practice for companies that are trying to protect their reputation and trade marks from the likes of yellow press and the unconscientious users.
It is remarkable that often no actual sites exist under these domain names or in some there is a re-direction to the actual, genuine website. Small and mid-cap companies could also take advantage of this practice for the protection of their products and trade marks from the undesirable information that can harm to the image of company. Specialists in marketing can use this tactics for the protection of buyers from the phishing attacks. What is phishing? Phishing is a fraud e-mail that is a legitimate-looking email sent out by the perpetrator for the purpose of gathering personal and/or financial information from recipients. Such emails are misleading the recipients by looking like they arrive from well-known web sites (for example eBay, PayPal etc). Personal information can also be obtained by email worms that can hide in email attachment or links. When such attachment is opened or one clicks on a link contained in the email body, the information one enters is then sent back to criminal. See our article for a list of recommended free anti-virus software.
The chances of phishers considerably decrease if company already manages all possible domain names with the diverse variants of company name spelling. It goes without saying that the registration of the entire pool of domains can come expensive. However, the fight with the yellow press, phishers and other forms of on-line- swindle can cost much more. Therefore the registration of additional domain names is the correct business solution.
Are you worried about your brand risk and reputation? Then go ahead and protect your company brand with a domain name. Any company that has a website will understand the importance of buying typos of their company name. People can be bad spellers or can simply accidentally mistype a domain name. But if the company owns its typos, there is no need to worry about lost traffic and brand risk. There are lots of big players who adopt this strategy. For example, Google, the world s largest Internet company, owns more than 500 domain names such as:
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- Gooogle redirects to Google
- Googel redirects to Google
- Gogle redirects to Google
- Ggoogle.com redirects to Google
- Googil redirects to Google
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The price of the domain name is something to consider when trying protecting a brand. If the business is referred to by a common phrase/term and the cost of additional domain name would cost less than the lost value/revenues from potential visitors, then you should definitely consider of spending your money. Keep in mind that alternate extensions for brand protection are also important! Good luck with your online business and online reputation!
