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International Domains: Think Globally,
Act Locally To Capture Local Markets
By Lee HodgsonI recently had a conversation with the CEO of a medium-sized American company, which was currently expanding into several key international markets. He came
straight to the point, "I can't understand why companies spend thousands of dollars on those country domain names, you know dot co.uk and whatever." he said. "Dot coms are the international language of
Internet business. Everyone knows this. You just don't need any other domain names."
He certainly made an interesting point. Dot coms are indeed recognized worldwide. What he seemingly failed to appreciate
is that in many countries, dot com equals America. Not necessarily in a negative sense, just in the sense that a dot com name is not seen as a local solution. Any CEO who has successfully entered foreign markets will
tell you: "if you aren't presenting a local solution, you're not presenting a solution at all".
I tried to press this point home with an example. "In Germany, all the top ten visited e-commerce
sites use a dot de domain name rather than a dot com". There was a brief pause, but then he came straight back, 'We don't have an office in Germany". Fair enough, let's try a different approach.
"OK", I said, "aren't you concerned about cybersquatters or business rivals owning your international domain names and redirecting the traffic to their own sites?" "Of course not", he
replied. "If anyone takes one of our names, we'll take it right back. Whay do you think we pay our lawyers?" Good point, but even highly paid lawyers sometimes cannot overcome the vagaries of
international copyright and trademark laws. For instance, for all the corporate muscle of eBay and Pepsi-Cola Inc., ebay.fr is currently not owned by eBay and Pepsi-Cola Inc. does not own pepsi.co.kr.
He still
wasn't impressed. "OK, so we lose a bit of type-in traffic to squatters. We'll live with that. It certainly doesn't justify all the trouble and expense of registering domain names in each and every country we sell
to."
This may or may not be true. A large corporation such as Pepsi-Cola or eBay generates massive type-in traffic with its local domain name, even when they have never advertised their services using the
local domain name. In many international markets, users type in the country code domain before the dot com version, because it is THEIR domain and most sites they visit use the local domain. You can't escape the fact.
I still felt I was along way from persuading my friend about the benefits of registering his domain name in international markets, so I tried my final gambit: "Did you know that most local search engines
either (a) favour local domains over dot coms, or (b) only list local domains?"
"Yeah, but surely everyone uses Yahoo.com don't they? Even in foreign countries?"
With this final statement, I
knew my friend's dot com centric view of the world wasn't going to change in a hurry. I hope you have a slightly more international view of the world. It will certainly help your bottom line internationally if you do.
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