Interesting Branding Decision by Citrix
One of the most useful online meeting websites is GoToMeeting.com, which offers a wide variety of online conferencing services. During the past year, I’ve been hearing more about the company, and I have participated on a few conferences using their services. In 2003, Citrix acquired ExpertCity, Inc (GoToMeeting’s founding company) for a reported $225 million in cash and stock.
Recently, I noticed a television campaign for GoToMeeting, although most of the time I am not paying attention to the screen. It’s fairly easy to remember the company name, but there is no guarantee that someone who hasn’t used the service will remember the brand name when they are looking to set up a web conference. Someone could also accidentally type in “2″ instead of “to” or do some other typo.
In my opinion, the absolute best domain name for a meeting service is clearly Meeting.com. It’s the industry defining term and it’s simple to remember. Sometime towards the end of 2006, ExpertCity/Citrix acquired Meeting.com, and the domain name currently resolves to the GoToMeeting website. If someone types in Meeting.com, they will get to the GoToMeeting website.
This begs the question, is Citrix making a branding mistake by using GoToMeeting.com when they already own Meeting.com?
Related posts:
- Cooking Channels Owns .TV Domain But Doesn’t Use It for Branding I recently noticed that my cable tv provider added a...
- Opt Out of ISP Landing Pages Have you ever typed in a domain name, and when...
- BlogSport.com: Is Yahoo Typosquatting Google’s Blogger Platform? You’ll Never Guess Whose Making Money on This Frequently Visited...
Comments (8)
Anthony
July 5th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Eliott I think they are running with the call to action
principle … meeting.com sounds neutral compared to
GOTOmeeting … because they own meeting.com they are
simply canibalizing themselves so no harm done … in
Canada the government is advertising flightflu.ca …
http://www.fightflu.ca/ … this domain elicits the question
How DO I fight the flu and will lead to action … The
question is if they advertised flu.ca (assuming they would
have bought it) would it have the same desired effect ?
Elliot
July 5th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
@ Anthony
Good point. It’s also a smart strategic defensive move because it prevents another company from coming into the market with the Meeting.com brand.
owen frager
July 5th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
They are also fighting the coke of meeting colas “webex” since they were bought by competitor Cisco. There have been lawsuits about the names and ads.
owen frager
July 5th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
They also laid out $300K for team.com only to forward to gotomeeting.com. There are many teams that use GTM for weekly “team meetings”
Greg Nelson
July 5th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Another interesting angle they could have taken would have been to chase GoTo.com when it was rebranded Overture and now YahooSM. I think they use the GoTo call to action though and have other “GoTo” brands…GoToMyPC.com (also own MyPC.com). Just looks like a smart brand strategy overall with the missing link to me being the GoTo.com. Citrix does well with their brands and domains it seems.
Greg Nelson
July 5th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Interesting study in corporate domains at the company website – http://www.citrixonline.com/ and I would guess they have their sites on GoTo.com if they can wrestle it away. Already using “webinar, assist, meeting, mypc” and from what I gather own the exact .com of each without the GoTo as well. Nice.
Kevin
July 6th, 2009 at 3:15 am
All of these are insightful comments, but another answer is more linguistic in nature. If you heard it say, on the radio or in conversation, and have never heard of it before, it is not readily apparent what website they are pitching.
If a user hears it as “Go to meeting.com and blahblahblah,”
owning meeting.com isn’t defensive it’s pure intelligence.
I work in an environment where the people I converse with on a daily basis are easily in the top .5% of web-users as rated by their knowledge of the internet-at-large.
That tends to color what I think the “average” user knows or is capable of understanding. At least without careful thought on my part.
Owning meeting.com as a redirect sounds like this crew understands the average web-user very well.
Greg Nelson
July 10th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Dead on Kevin. Did not actually think of the TV ad (word of mouth) hearsay…”gotomeeting.com taken as “go to meeting.com”. This blows up my GoTo theory, but I think Kevin is dead on. Nice.
Leave a reply