There are a number of big companies that seem to have shares in the domain registration business. Search for Nissan on Google, and in addition to www.nissanusa.com (the official site), www.nissanmotors.com, www.nissan.co.uk, www.nissan.co.jp, www.nissandriven.com, www.nissan-europe.com, www.nissan.com (nothing to do with Nissan Motors), www.nissan.ca, www.nissan-global.com and www.nissan.be complete the first page of results.
While most companies seem keen to proliferate geographically-based domains, Nike has based its domains around activities - in addition to www.nike.com, there's www.nikefootball.com, www.nikegolf.com, www.nikebasketball.com, www.nikecycling.com etc. They also differentiate by gender, although there is no male equivalent to www.nikewomen.com.
I've been troubled by this brand-dilution for a while, but www.adidas-1.com (the first intelligent footwear) was the one to compel me to post.
At first, I was under the impression that this behaviour was driven by technical issues - having a single domain fed by multiple infrastructures and content delivery engines could be quite a challenge. But this can easily be managed at the DNS level through sub-domain entries. Yahoo!'s regional domains all redirect to subdomains of the yahoo.com domain (e.g. www.yahoo.co.uk goes to http://uk.yahoo.com), each of which could easily be served by a different system.
With this excuse out of the window, I can think of only two other reasons why this behaviour might be so widespread:
- The standards (limitations?) imposed by the corporate site are perceived too limiting for the sub-site's specific needs
- The chosen domain (www.adidas-1.com) is perceived to be cooler than a sub-domain of or sub-directory within the corporate one (e.g. http://1.adidas.com, www.adidas.com/1).
The combination of these two reasons explains why there are over 3,000 .gov.uk domains. Who knows - maybe they're up to 4,000 by now.
The benefits of adhering to the standards imposed by the corporate centre outweigh the associated limitations. By creating a whole bunch of "campaign" sites, sites that often stray from brand guidelines, short-term localised goals are met, but at the detriment of the brand itself. No wonder the UK government struggles to develop a powerful brand with so much distraction.
Check out www.nikegolf.com and www.nikefootball.com. The only commonality between the two sites is that you have to disable pop-ups to get beyond the homepage - how to reduce your audience by 70% without thinking. Surely it would be more powerful if they were skinned in a similar way
