While down the Cape this weekend with a bunch of friends, we frequented this bar Harry’s on Main Street in Hyannis. (Fun place BTW.)

On one of our trips there, the bartender, Rick, was talking about Pandora. Hearing half of the conversation, my friend raised her wrist saying, “I have a Pandora.” Well, Rick wasn’t talking about the bracelet, he was talking about Pandora Radio. (On a side note, four of us at the bar had Motorola DROIDs, which is where the conversation spawned from.)

This got me thinking…

It’s essential to market your brand very carefully when a company has the same – or a similar name – as another brand, or you could cause a brand identity crisis.

While this was just the case of not hearing the brand Pandora in the right context, if not branded correctly, you could be sending your customers on a wild goose chase – causing them a lot of aggravation on the way.

Creating your company’s URL with the exact company could divert some of the confusion. Let’s take the above situation as an example: if you type in Pandora.com and you are looking for Pandora jewelry, you will be directed to Pandora Radio. Which would be a problem, if I was looking for Pandora Jewelry.

So what if you can’t brand a company’s URL to the exact name? Make sure your customers – or future customers – are aware of your actual homepage link when you market yourself. Try and get your link as similar as possible to your company name. Or, in the very least make sure your URL is easy to remember!

For example, I heard a radio ad for Volvo on the way to work today. They were advertising New England Volvo retailers and made sure to let listeners know that their website was http://www.nevolvo.com. Note the N-E to make sure listeners didn’t just visit the general Volvo site.

How’s your URL branded? Is it your company name? Something similar?

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Technorati Tags: Branding, Pandora, URLs, Volvo

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