The Importance of a Dot Com and Understanding Your Target Market

The importance of having a dot com instead of a .ca or a .mobi or any other extension right now motivated us to buy a bunch of new domain names and change all of our branding.

Until someone pointed out the obvious problem, we figured .ca would be a fine extension for our new travel site.  We liked the name Oggle.ca and since we couldn't get Oggle.com we assumed the .ca would be just fine.

But I think that's a problem many small businesses face.  My marketing teacher in grade 10 taught me one of the most important lessons I would ever learn.  "We don't care about what you think, we care about what your target market thinks."  This is somewhat paraphrased, but the gist is pretty clear.

My partners and I are all on a scale of tech that exceeds the regular population by a percentage ranging from 25 (myself) to 150.  This means we had (have) a bit of a hard time designing a site for people who don't understand computers as we do.  It took a close and very smart friend of ours finally pointed out why the .com is important.  

(If you don't know what I'm talking about, see the wiki article on domains here and the wiki article on .com here)

When I was just starting to email I had a new "friend" that was a couple of years older than me and just starting university.  She was trying to give me her email address on the phone and I kept mistaking the extension because I didn't see the relevance until after I had hung up.  

"Ok, so that was firstname.lastname (pretty simple) @ youbeesee.com, no, yubeceedot what? Uh, ok, ok, try again, ok, the letters..." and on and on.  Today it seems so incredibly simple that I barely remember that I even had a problem.

If only she had said, no, UBC as in "University British Columbia" dot ca as in short for "Canada" I would have understood more easily.

The problem I see is that today with email forwards and everyone having a .com email address whether its hotmail or a company address, no one needs to know what the domains are.  Of course the other big ones like .org or .net are pretty easy to understand because you've seen them so many times.

With email forwarding, electronic business cards and more it is even more unlikely you'll need to write an obscure email address down.

It is my experience that most people don't want to learn how the Internet works, they just want it to work without any effort.  This seems like a major component of Apple's advertising.  Simple, attractive, works, no viruses, etc.  How is this not attractive?  For people who use computers as simple tools to augment their lives and don't want or need to understand the inner workings I can see how Microsoft's nearly infinite ability to be personalized is more trouble than it is worth.

This is why we spent the extra money on a .com and others.  So when someone sees "Oistr" and manage to remember the odd spelling, at least when they automatically type oistr.com it will just work.