If you watched the Masters golf tournament over the past several days, you may have noticed Phil Mickelson sporting a KPMG hat. Viewers who decided to check out KPMG.com would notice something that a few domain investors emailed me about during the prior few days. KPMG, one of the largest management consulting and accounting firms, shifted its primary url from KPMG.com to Home.KPMG.
The company published a press release announcing the change, and it also shared why it made the change:
“KPMG Member Firms corporate websites now employ a web address that departs from the former “home.kpmg.com” to the “home.kpmg” proprietary domain.
KPMG has become the first of the Big Four professional services firms to launch its corporate websites under its own branded top level domain name, .kpmg. The firm has moved its home.kpmg.com site to home.kpmg. The move enhances the KPMG brand through a strong, simplified name, and provides end users with a level of assurance that any site that ends with .kpmg is owned and operated by KPMG.
Since the top level domain can only be used by KPMG, visitors to sites that use the new top level domain can easily confirm its authenticity and be assured that the information they contain is reliable and secure.
It is intended as the first step of many in creating a consolidated, secure, and trustworthy space for the KPMG member firm network and its online digital footprint.”
Using Dofo.com, I can see that there are currently seven .KPMG domain names in existence, including:
- Nic.KPMG
- Home.KPMG
- Assets.KPMG
- Author.KPMG
- Social.KPMG
- Developers.KPMG
- AnnualReview.KPMG
It looks like the company has been using Social.KPMG for its social sharing links when not referencing Home.KPMG.
This change is noteworthy because of the breadth of KPMG’s relationships with other large businesses who will undoubtedly see the .KPMG extension in use. It could potentially spur on other companies to adopt the same .brand usage should the change be a success.
Personally, I don’t really love the “home” domain name, but figuring out what to use for the primary domain name is an inherent issue. I guess “home” is sort of the default, but it could be anything.
Used to be so easy…..
KPMG.com
Now, so confusing.
KPMG.WHAT
WHAT.KPMG
WHO.KPMG
Damn, what is the NEW WORD I have to remember??
.com was easy, did not have to remember anything.
Most confusing award for 2019 goes to……..
confusing.KPMG
Where does tgat go?
They don’t even know about wildcards……
MORONS!!
Wildcarding is tricky. As the company does not want somethingbad.kpmg to resolve. Naturally an error should be shown.
They also own KP.MG, which does not resolve either.
Why don’t they want it to resolve??
Just take them all back to the home page.
You can’t control the nonsense they type in, but you can control those that type it in.
They will definitely be able to control their brand 100% but I agree that Home doesn’t feel right especially for a financial company.
Not sure I would do that if it was up to me…
@rick this is a good example that a lot of people don’t remember URLs. There are so many opportunities for them to not have to remember them. They click a link or just google it and click a link.
One reason to move to your own .brand is to reassure customers that they are on the right url, and not a phishing url. Based on the KPMG statement, that sounds as if it’s one reason they moved.
@bill
They certainly won’t remember that one.
And if there is ever a security breech, game over.
Someone will figure out how to hack and mirror.
And if Google is the end all, why do so many advertise on TV and Radio?
Do they want them to go to Google and pay twice?
An Isralie General once said something like:
Nothing is secure.
If man can build it, man can break into it.
Ain’t that the truth, Rick!
.com is GIVEN, 99.9% of the consumers know it, recognise it, USE it. That is an incredible advantage for companies because consumers only need to remember the part that is left of the dot.
Now they’re throwing that advantage away deliberately and without cause.
At least they’re not a consumer facing brand so it won’t affect their “sales” directly. But a horrible decision.
Same as the Danish bank Saxo 2 or 3 years ago. They rebranded from saxobank.com to home.saxo.
You have a history with the Danish, Rick.. don’t you 🙂
Agreed, nothing is 100 percent secure. But moving to a .brand does help, and it’s only one reason of many to move.
They don’t have to pay google to show up. In this case they apparently they saw the benefits have outweighed staying on a .com.
@Bill
Problem is they probably never truly weighed all the pluses and minuses.
They are about to find a minefield of pitfalls that never even crossed their minds or discussed by those that made this unfortunate decision. Time will prove it.
They can all slap themselves on the back now, it won’t last.
The key is making it easier to find you not harder. They failed! They chose CUTE over common sense and what works.
And apparently they weren’t smart enough to register homekpmg.com as a defensive move.
But someone else was, and now it forwards to a Chinese sportsbetting website. Well done..
Companies that don’t have a domain strategy are going to pay dearly in the future.
All the geniuses and none can see a LEAK no matter how big or how small?
They are clueless about these pitfalls and if we point them out, they will LAUGH and IGNORE!
Captains that are not qualified.
True @Rick. They chose safety over branding/marketing, but the problem is they’re trying to fix something that was never broken. It’s my belief that a lot of these decision makers at these big companies have fancy resumes, but have no clue what they’re doing.
The impression I had from experience catering to them is KPMG operated like Arthur Anderson, every year they recruit a fresh crop of graduates to run their interface. It’s why the college admission scandal won’t quit it’s flare-up as the backend results of these deals become present.
They may regret this move. But even if it was well thought-out from a security perspective, it seems like their homepage should simply be KPMG@KPMG (not Home@KPMG)
They are doing it backwards, should be home.kpmg forwarding to kpmg.com.
Home.kpmg.com would of been a better idea IMO.
They will change it back to kpmg.com eventually though, when they realize how dumb of a move it was to change to home.kpmg
They should of registered homekpmg.com and used that domain instead of home.kpmg
KPMG is a complete joke.
kpmg.home
should be a porn site…
The reality, now people have to remember twice as much as they did before. “Home” “Dot” “KPMG” when prior, all people had to remember was “KPMG” and the “dot” “com” is just natural. KPMG is not the easiest to remember and it’s actually the problem. Now people are forced to remember something new, “HOME” AND the 4 letter acronym K P M G, plus the DOT (which people often forget).
Exactly!!
Dumb is so obvious it’s hard to keep quiet about it!
That’s not a good argument Jamie. When you are right of the dot you are the brand. All they have to do is point every single left of the dot word to wherever they want to forward it to. People don’t have to remember anything except .kpmg. They can point go.kpmg, try.kpmg, get.kpmg and hundreds of others directly to home.kpmg. It’s absolutely mistake proof.
They haven’t registered all of those and there is probably thousands of potential registrations. Buying them all is a bandaid solution because the real solution to the confusion is completely obvious, don’t use confusing domain extensions.
Why would they need to “buy” or “register” within their own TLD?
Each one is a separate domain name, so they need to be registered to work. Also, there is a small ICANN fee for each registered domain name.
What I personally find interesting here is that this ONE company has moved to their own .BRAND TLD and the sheer number of comments, Tweets, posts about it.
If it wasn’t such a big deal, and they’re eventually going to move back to .COM, there wouldn’t be so many comments and Tweets, posts about it, right?!?
There were a whole lot of news articles, tweets, and comments about the man in Florida who was killed by a cassowary over the weekend.
It’s interesting, but it doesn’t really have further implications on anyone else.
Correct observation, wrong conclusion. 🙂
Nope.
It’s a big deal cuz it is so obviously moronic and not as well thought out as one might imagine.
We are experts at this. We are articulating all the pitfalls that so many want to ignore. I personally like to be on record, that way when it happens, I have a timestamp of when I saw it coming.
When I started saying YEARS ago about how GTLD’s would “DIE ON THE VINE” the GTLD guys thought I was crazy. Got called many names. Well, they are now dying on the vine. Hundreds of them. I was the first one to articulate that. I saw that coming 5++ years ago and some can’t see it in 5 minutes from now regardless of the evidence. This business, ALL business, is about seeing things before they materialize.
Leaks are a BIG deal. A leaky boat sinks. And even if it does not sink, performance suffers with the added and useless weight. There is no winning hand in this equation. Growth will suffer. But they can carry on. I don’t care.
But in a few years, I will be the one on record for this fiasco. They have to deal with these issues and it’s going to be a HOOT to watch! Smarter companies have already learned. They will learn too.
On the record, for the record. 🙂
The one thing they did do right was keep the .com but some genius there may disconnect it next week! That would be a mistake right?? So if they did that, it would be our DUTY to point that out because it is so insane.
Terrible way to use a branded extension. CEO has no understanding of domain value, strategy, or minimum customer access friction.
Customers have never heard of .kpmg and many will question whether it is a scam. I know I did.
They had the motherload of domains for their brand and someone went and messed it up…after convincing an entire group of executives this new URL was the best, most trustworthy and convenient address for KPMG to use. Fire them.
BINGO!
Sack the CEO!
The worst part will be what the email will look like for 200,000 employees. If they’re not changing the emails of everyone then why even go this route.
You only have one upgrade at this point and that is to own K.com. My prediction-This branding will fail in 24-36 months due to confusion and lost emails.
Exactly.. because they will switch to xxx@home.kpmg as email addresses and people will think it’s a scam or a typo and probably use xxx@homekpmg.com (which they don’t own) or xxx@home-kpmg.com (which they own!)
What a mess!
K.com is no upgrade for them, almost as confusing as .kpmg.
firstname@lastname.kpmg, very simple. no need to use any nonsense extentions. keep it to the point.
Using your suggestion, that would mean they need to register the last name domain name for every employee. For instance, if I was an employee they would need to register Silver.kPMG to make it work.
no need to register every last name domain name.
unlimited sub cat., thats the nice thing about gtlds. Its all controlled and secured.
Second level domain does not function without proper DNS settings. You cant automate that. ICANN recommended against even attempts to wildcard 2nd level domains.
Since when was kpmg.com broken and in need of fixing when “.com” is the first and easiest thing people would think of? Is this just a misguided vanity and pride thing?
intuitively I typed the dot com. Any other dot BS is a scam
if there is home.amazon, I guarantee you the traffic will drop like a s**&^hole in the toilet
One of the reasons that KPMG moved to Home.KPMG is that they wanted a shorter domain name. They previously were using home.kpmg.com and now they are using home.kpmg. This is an upgrade–which is a shorter domain name.
To KMPG, ditching the .COM part of their URL was an upgrade… they detailed this in their press release.
Huh? They were using kpmg.com. home.kpmg.com is a subdomain and they could have easily get rid of that in minutes without applying for a new .kpmg string. That they failed to secure a no brainer like homekpmg.com is showing their complete lack of competence in this area. They had kpmg.com which is 7 letters, not they are using home.kpmg which is 8. Nice downgrade..
Instead of using home, use letter h —-ie h.kpmg ( 5 letters) h as home.
Bill, you’ve put me in a very difficult position, and I’m trying to restrain myself. Are you seriously commenting as if that makes any sense vs. “KPMG.com” as the main platform, no “home” needed? I can accept that they don’t know what they were doing, like whoever paid $1m for block-chain.com as if it is two words when it’s only one, but not you. Or have you never actually used domains and you only broker them, so you don’t even know the “home” is never needed?
@john that’s their reasoning here–KPMG has been using “home” so they moved and “ditched” the dot com part of it. it’s in their press release https://home.kpmg/xx/en/home/media/press-releases/2019/04/kpmg-launches-new-online-home-with-kpmg-domain.html
Granted, they never really needed to ever use “home” as a subdomain at all. But I suspect that’s been a tech decision, as “home” has most likely been on another server. It makes sense to move to ‘home.kpmg’ since their prior site was “home” and that’s what their customers were used to seeing.
So right now there’s 8 domains registered (according to what Elliot posted). What would you suggest that they use for the “home page”? Canon is using “global” as in global.canon.
So now the public has to see this: https://home.kpmg/xx/en/home.html.
Do they think there is some reason in the world why the public would not have been able to cope with seeing something like this if they still want to include the nice warm fuzzy word “home”:
https://kpmg.com/home.html
or
https://kpmg.com/en/home.html
https://kpmg.com/fr/home.html
etc.
And they could just be forwarding all traffic on the sub-domain to kpmg.com/something or to just https://kpmg.com/something/home.html.
The above monstrosity repeating the word “home” twice along with “xx” can hardly be considered an improvement to anyone who isn’t stoned or drunk imo. In fact, it’s downright weird and confusing if you are not well versed in how urls work the way we are.
Unbelievable, face palm moment re them.
Yeah, no question that the real home page of the site should not include a filename or directory in the URL. If they’re redirecting users base on their location, though, it can get messy.
My reply apparently in mod status now…
Elliot looks like my reply went into moderation…
It is approved. Had 3+ links so it gets held automatically.
If you go and use a gtld, you just put one foot in a business grave. Now for a big company like them, it may take a little longer, but after the publicity tampers down, I think they will silently ditch the .crap and go back to the old reliable .com
Just a dumb publicity stunt in progress. Surely no company could be so .dumb
I am amazed at how many people out there actually thought that ntlds were a good idea. They were so bad that it was obvious all along that they were soon going to die. I am glad they have gone the way of .mobi
Such a remark is but a disrespectful, bumptious point of view.
I am amazed at how many “.com warriors” out there actually claim that ntlds is a bad idea and keep attacking ntlds in fear of ntlds’ values rise and ruin their investments.
It’s about perception.
.com is Main Street
.anythingelse is try-hard and setting up shop in the middle of a Utah desert
It’s like the classic branding mistake, calling your business or brand “Julex” or some other garbage because it’s a contraction of your kids names (Julie & Alex). No one cares. People care what they can get, they don’t care about your stupid kids. Learn people.
Don’t think twice about a new TLD. Why? Because you shouldn’t even think once. They are for losers who are either too cheap or too stupid to buy the .com and who cannot distinguish their goods and services in any other way and so do it with a URL.
Discourteous words spotted. Not much different from Paul’s.
The majority of CEO’s are clueless when it comes to domain names.
KPMG used to be Peat Marwick. Peat Marwick is name they used in the 80’s and early 90’s to make hotel and restaurant reservations and contracts for their catered events in DC. A TESS search for “Peat Marwick” reveals the 10 TM Registrations they had for “KPMG Peat Marwick” which they abandoned and cancelled.
Since 2014, PeatMarwick.com is registered to Park KyeongSook
In the future ParkKyeongSook can explain why she registered PeatMarwick.com instead of the real name.
I agree with the majority of the comments here, It isn’t wise to move from your 4 letter brand (.com) to anything else. I think they should not have sent out the press release or do a big LAUNCH, that was the mistake. If they really “love” the fact they have their own TLD, fine but use it and introduce it very selectively/slowly. Maybe have it be for their VIP clients or something like that for a few years. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it!
Looks like a desperate and lame attempt to look cutting edge / relevant against their competitors Ernst & Young who use EY.com and look genuinely Boss.
Never ask the IT department for a marketing decision lol