50 Year Old Company Rebrands With a .Health Domain Name

A company called Sound Mental Health announced (via press release) that it was undergoing a rebrand. The company will now be known simply as “Sound.” To enable this rebranding effort, the company is now using the Sound.Health new gTLD domain name for its website. The press release noted that the company has been in business for 50 years.

A Whois search shows that this company is the first registrant of the domain name. It is unclear to me if this domain name is classified as a premium domain name (ie the buyer had to work out a deal with the .Health domain registry) or if this was simply a hand-registered domain name with a normal renewal rate. It looks like .Health domain names cost $69.99/year at GoDaddy and other registrars seem to be in the same ballpark. Sound.Health is registered at MarkMonitor, a brand protection and domain name management company.

If you visit Sound.Health, you will notice the company’s logo does not reference the .Health aspect of the domain name. In addition, it does not appear that the company referenced the .Health domain name in its page title or description. It will be interesting to see how the company lets its customers and partners know it is using a .Health domain name.

If there is any confusion and people visit SoundHealth.com, they will be directed to error page because that domain name is not being used at this time. A Whois search shows that Anthem, the major health insurance company, owns SoundHealth.com. That domain name had previously been owned by Wellpoint, so perhaps it had been used in the past but is no longer needed. I think it would behove them to try and acquire that domain name, although it can be quite expensive to buy domain names from major corporations. Another potentially confusing domain name for a company called “Sound” is obviously the Sound.com domain name. Sound.com is a very high value domain name owned by a domain investment firm. It is parked at Uniregistry without a “for sale” link at the top of the page. That domain name might be obtainable, but it would likely have a very high 6 or 7 figure price tag because of its value.

Sound sounds like a nice brand name, and the company will soon find out whether it made a sound decision with its rebranding.