The Bank’s senior digital marketing executives wanted to benchmark their digital strategy for domain names vis-a-vis their competitors and have a clear idea of business application use cases for the new Brand TLDs. With this exercise they also wanted to establish internal best practices for their current domain usage policies and procedures.
BUSINESS CHALLENGES
Following an initial internal self-assessment, the Bank’s Digital Brand team recognized their lack of strategy in considering acquiring their own Brand TLD. Speciically, they felt they lacked:
- An appreciation of their competitor(s) positioning with respect to use of domains;
- Awareness and understanding of use cases in the financial sector;
- Understanding of Line of Business stakeholders’ contribution to a domain strategy;
- Unclear and out-dated policies and procedures governing domain usage
SOLUTION AND OUTCOMES
The Bank engaged Authentic Web to guide stakeholders to an improved state of strategic readiness. The process kicked off with a stakeholder discovery and diagnosis session. Authentic Web advisors gathered current process information, stakeholder views and sentiments regarding the new TLD(s). From these inputs, the following Professional Services deliverables were:
First
To define new Policies and Procedures governing the Bank’s end-to-end information flows to support domain registrations, edits, renewals and expiries. Also included were:
- Process workflows
- Information requirements
- Owners, roles and actions
- Approval decision points
- Provisioning notifications (and other details)
The resulting documented policies included a domain nomenclature frame of reference and defined terms for recommended URL types that mapped to digital use cases to ensure logical consistency for various domain types and uses.
Second
To define a Strategic Point of View (POV) to guide business/product owners and digital marketing leadership on the implications of both generic TLDs as well as the new Brand TLDs to the enterprise. This POV ensured that decision makers would be aligned behind a definitive business case to support a brand registry application in Round 2. It also formulated a starting frame of reference or base point for the enabling the Bank to track their progress against the marketplace.
Third
To analyze the Bank’s situation against that of competitors enabling business/product owners and their service groups to understand their competitive position relative to peers and emerging best practices in the marketplace.
CLIENT PERSPECTIVE
The head of digital marketing was able to promote an all-new, standardized process for managing domains from inception to expiry throughout the organization. In additional his team was able to formulate a complete strategy to prepare for their Brand TLD application in the coming ICANN round.
He said, “prior to engaging Authentic Web we simply did not have the time or expertise to delve into this area. We suspected that we had issues but could not seem to get a handle on the scope or implications of our domain portfolio direction. Authentic Web helped us define the three critical areas in need of action. Their organized, logical and comprehensive approach gave us end-result documentation that will literally chart our course from present-day policies to ultimately applying for our own brand registry and using it to innovate our brand to achieve positive business results across the enterprise.”