If you have never heard of Office Depot® you may live under a rock or live in a country that there is no office business called Office Depot.
Office Depot understands the power of Domain Names and uses not only it’s exact match company domain OfficeDepot.com they own and use a lot more! They use "catchy" domain names like their new "microsite" aka Mini-Site Top30SmartGifts.com (I am personally not a huge fan of this specific domain) or a site like OfficeDepotRacing.com in order to create a community for it’s main racing sponsored car and driver Tony Stewart®.
Office Depot also owns a "GEM" of a domain name… School.com which they use during back to school time, which is a huge market! They simply forward on users to OfficeDepot.com but it allows Office Depot to track how they are doing and to use the domain name in specific "school" related advertising!
If you have considered using a catchy domain for marketing or a different domain name for whatever reason, I highly suggest you read the following article for proof that it makes sense to use more than one domain name for your business / website.
Here is a great article by MultiChannelMerchant.com that did an interview with Monica Luechtefeld, Office Depot’s executive vice president-e-commerce and direct marketing. (part way down)
She talks about Mini-Sites (Microsites), using domain names without their brand name in it, creating communities with other domains/microsites and more!
If you are a domain name investor, I suggest you visit the article as well and bookmark it. It is some powerful info that proves it works and can be a tool to pass the data along to your customers. Office Depot not only uses more than one domain name, they say it works while explaining why!
I could of quoted Monica here on DotWeekly on nearly every answer she gave as I was Happy to hear what she was saying! You didn’t read the story yet? Read it!
I will end with a quote that Monica said that would please any domain name investor:
But wouldn’t all these separate URLs hurt Office Depot as it tries to grow its Website? Not at all, Luechtefeld says. For one, the more separate URLs a merchant has, the better the chance someone will find Office Depot in one way or another through a search engine.
It’s not every day an interview is done like this when a company REALLY GET’S Domains and talks about the more you own the better!
Jeff
Jamie,
I’m in the business and I’m leading towards them not really knowing domain names. There are a lot smaller companies that get names.
Take a look at toner.com. They don’t own. Copiers.com or printers.com. Nope.
School.com is powerful but imo they really don’t get it.
For instance toners.com sold for around 75,000 last year. Its now up and running. Moniker is offering officesupply.com in auction or trying unload it. Killer category name but you don’t see them having it.
Just my 2 cents Jamie but I agree on school.com name
oes tsetnoc
That is a great idea, this is a site about domains, they are using domains in more of an SEO capacity. Trying to catch key phrases for one and if they are smart, none of those sites share the same c-class ip. They are probably realizing there are “Little Guy” sites competing with them, maybe even selling their own products, by using small techniques optimized sites backlinking.
owen frager
So does Office Max:
http://fragerfactor.blogspot.com/2008/01/little-elves-that-could-com-madison-ave.html
btw, I wanted to share this on facebook but you don’t have the tool on here, so I shared from the source (see box on left called “article tools). I am still trying to work this out on Blogger. They only show when you use direct navigation to the story permalink like above example.
John Humphrey
It seems marketers are of two minds about this. Probably a lot depends on how the search engines are algorithming this week. I think of the questions as ‘link juice’ vs. branding. If the search engines are weighting the content similarly, doesn’t it make more sense to add it to your main site?-To increase the value of your brand?
Eric Borgos of ImpulseCorp.com discusses this very subject (he used hundreds of mini-sites to channel interest back to Bored.com) in an audio interview I did recently. I know it sounds like a shameless plug, but honestly, Eric shares some amazing experiences that apply directly to domainer/developers like ourselves. I felt like I hit the jackpot. Check it out.