Study Underlines Excellent Brand Image of .de

In a recently published study investigating the ranking and the

attractiveness of Top Level Domains as assessed by Internet users the

ccTLD .de scored excellently and recorded the best TLD result, preceding

.com and .co.uk. Sabine Dolderer, CEO of DENIC, the independent provider

of the name service for the .de zone, values this as another proof of

DENIC’s competent performance to the benefit of the Internet community and

as an acknowledgement of DENIC’s nearly 23-year old proven and tested

business model of self-controlled domain administration.

The study, which was executed by EURid, the operator that administers the

TLD .eu, illuminates the interplay between the attractiveness of a leading

TLD – as a combined result of brand strength and customer service quality

– and the number of end users interested in domains under that TLD. EURid

included the generic Top Level Domains (gTLD) .com, .net, .org, .biz,

.info and .eu and the European country code Top Level Domains (ccTLD) .be,

.cz, .de, .dk, .es, .fr, .it, .pl, .se and .co.uk in its assessment.

The brand strength of TLDs, which was defined as the total of the three

key attributes « Awareness », « Relevance » and « Preference », was determined

within the scope of a comparative brand analysis carried out between

December 2009 and January 2010 in 10 countries with 400 participants,

respectively.

While all ccTLDs included in the study scored 95% aided Awareness in their

home countries and thus were nearly level with .com, the results for

Relevance differed widely. Except for Sweden (.se) and Germany (.de) the

interviewed persons attributed much higher relevance to .com than to the

TLD of their own country.

More than three quarters of all the end users who participated in the

study preferred .com or their local TLD to any other gTLD. As regards the

Preference for .com or the respective ccTLD, the values varied

considerably by country: Only the country code TLDs of Germany (.de),

Sweden (.se), the Czech Republic (.cz) and Denmark (.dk) outscored .com in

this aspect of Preference ranking. The study found that the varying

assessments are due to the degree the individual TLD satisfies specific

brand characteristics: Users apparently prefer TLDs they feel to meet

conservative values such as « convincing », « trustworthy », « stable », « high

quality » and « safe » particularly well.

As regards the second pillar of a TLD’s attractiveness, customer service,

the German ccTLD also achieved very good results in the overall rating.

Here, .de scored second among all the investigated ccTLDs, preceded only

slightly by .nl.

The complete study “How Top-Level Domain Customer Service and Brand

Influence Customer Buying Behaviour” with all the results and analyses can

be found on the website of EURid for download at

http://www.eurid.eu/en/about/facts-figures/insights.