Via Seth Godin’s blog:
“Newton gets all kinds of credit. They call it the Law of Gravity. They put his picture on pages that profile geniuses. They say he discovered gravity. Nonsense. He just named it.
Everyone ‘believes’ in gravity. And yet, we know virtually nothing about it. We don’t know how gravity waves (if there are any) are transmitted. We can’t block them (anti gravity boots!) and we can’t amplify them and we have no idea how fast they travel. There are very few people doing serious gravity research and development, either. But it’s apparently a law.
Evolution (and one’s confidence or lack of belief thereof), on the other hand, is enough to sway a school board election or get you nominated for federal office. I’ve never met an informed person who doubted the general facts about evolution unless they had an alternative view of the origin of species that they felt emotionally connected to. There are evolution skeptics who would prefer a different story, but no gravity skeptics, even though there’s a lot less science there.
What’s up with that?
There are two reasons that gravity has had so much better marketing than evolution, and both may impact the way you market your product or service as well.
1. If the story of your marketing requires the prospect to abandon a previously believed story, you have a lot of work to do.
Nobody had a seriously described theory of gravity before Newton named it. No one walks around saying that they have a story about why we stick to the earth better than the gravity story. As a result, there was no existing story or worldview to overthrow. Naming something that people already believe in is very smart marketing.
2. If the timeframe of the message of your marketing is longer than the attention span (or lifetime) of the person you are marketing to, you have your work cut out for you as well.
Evolution is really slow. Hard to demonstrate it in real time during a school board meeting. Gravity is instantaneous. Baseball players use it every day.”
Continue reading here..
This also describes why short generic domains are so good for marketing purposes.
1. User’s natural reaction to a top tier generic domain name (such as Savings.com, Cheap.com, Hotels.com) is directly related to the meaning of the keywords, online. That is, the natural reaction for hotels.com would be “hotels online” or motels.com, “motels online”. The natural reaction for Savings.com, even if you have never heard of the site, is “savings online” as well as Books.com, “books online”. As Seth points out, top tier domain names, if matched with the correct products/services, are a “match”, therefore, will do better.
2. Top tier generic domain names are usually short, one or two keywords, in most instances are .com domain names (.com in the public eye means “internet”, “online”). They are easily recognized, understandable by the public.
From here on, as you move away from the ideal top tier domain name, you are lengthening your marketing timeframe, increasing marketing costs, and reducing conversions. In other words, you are making your life, and the life of your customer, harder.
Have a great day,
Sahar
Actually quite a bit is known about gravity, experiments showed they travel at the speed of light and recent theories explain interactions through bosons.
Trying to explain what you’ve pointed out to end users Sahar, is a lost battle.
It’s nice to see a nice theory to reinforce it, but it will never convince the majority of businesses/companies…especially when it’s being published on a blog predominantly read by domainers.
The other thing is convincing end users to give up their ‘brand’ & go with a generic domain name. In my experience often “ABC Financial services” are so tunnel visioned as far as their brand that they view using a domain like finance.com as diluting their brand message.
They forget that people generally search and respond to products and services rather than the company itself. The bigger the company the harder it is to convince.