Brand Marketing

Yesterday afternoon, Bloomberg reported that Calm, a popular meditation app, is looking to raise a round of funding at a $2.2 billion valuation. While Calm is an app, it also owns its brand match Calm.com domain name. It has owned Calm.com for many years, and that may have made a difference in its initial upward trajectory.

One of the early investors in Calm was Jason Calacanis, a venture capitalist and startup founder/advisor. Jason is also quite familiar with domain names. Some domain names he has owned or been involved with include 20.com, Inside.com, Annotated.com, and Mahalo.com.

Late last night on Twitter, Jason was reminiscing about his early $378,000 investment in Calm:

There are quite a few successful brands that simply use a dictionary word for branding. When a company builds its brand around a popular keyword, I always recommend getting the brand match .com domain name. The downside to branding on a generic term, especially when the brand match .com domain name is not owned by the company, is the potential for confusion.

I want to illustrate this with a pair of TechCrunch tweets from today and yesterday. The tweets link to articles about companies that use the generic term “Frame” in their branding and announced that they raised outside capital:

Sometimes domain name registrations can be leading indicators of a company’s future plans. Domain names can also be registered for protective purposes, preventing other people from registering and using them first. We don’t always know why a company registers particular domain names, but I find it interesting to observe domain names that large companies register.

This morning on Twitter, Jamie Zoch reported that Target registered several on-brand domain names related to Coronavirus / COVID 19 testing. For instance, Target registered TargetCoronaTest.com, TargetCovid19Test.com, TargetCovidTest.com, and TestingAtTarget.com:

Target Brands registers several covid test related domain names, potentially hinting at a near future store testing offering? pic.twitter.com/KAI0pWPBgV

— Jamie Zoch (@DotWeekly) March 24, 2020