While building consumer confidence was at the forefront of the Canon Group’s application for .CANON, the company has since used its dot brand to launch a series of cloud-based platforms to boost engagement and loyalty among customers.
Initiatives: Migration of main company website and mail server, suite of regional and product-specific websites, photo-sharing cloud platform and design tools
Models of use: Full migration, HR, marketing, products and services
Key benefits: Consumer trust, user engagement, brand control, anti-counterfeiting
Download Use Case PDFInitially driven by concerns over the rise of fake products and misleading information online, the Canon Group has since expanded the use of its dot brand domain to build trust, reinforce brand reputation and engage its customers in exciting new ways.
The global imaging giant was one of the first dot brand owners to migrate its corporate website back in 2016, stating in a press release at the time that .CANON domains would enable visitors to “easily confirm authenticity and be assured that the information they contain is reliable”.
This was followed in early 2018 with the launch of the new MEDICAL.CANON microsite for the recently rebranded Canon Medical Systems Group. Later that year, the company began migrating its email addresses to MAIL.CANON, explaining that it had recognised in the dot brand the “chance to adopt a uniform domain, improving communication and increasing operation efficiency”.
“visitors to sites that use the TLD can easily confirm their authenticity and be assured that the information they contain is reliable.”Canon Inc.
Canon focused first on consolidating its online presence using .CANON. It started by migrating its corporate site to GLOBAL.CANON in 2016, setting up a URL divert from CANON.COM.
Next, it set about simplifying its domain naming strategy, migrating country-specific sites in Asia over to the .CANON domain and setting up the ASIA.CANON regional landing page. In line with its goals to minimise consumer confusion and improve user experience, Canon established a short and consistent two-character naming strategy for each country, as with HK.CANON (Hong Kong), IN.CANON (India), KR.CANON (Korea), SG.CANON (Singapore) TH.CANON (Thailand), and VN.CANON (Vietnam).
Using a similar short naming structure, the group also launched a series of mini-sites for related product lines, subsidiaries and technologies, such as COT.CANON (Canon Ophthalmic Technologies), CPP.CANON (Canon Production Printing), ETD.CANON (Canon Electron Tubes & Devices) and FTN.CANON (Canon Finetech Nisca). Although the majority of these product and company-specific sites are based in Asia, this is not exclusively the case, as can be seen with MCU.CANON (Canon Medical Components USA).
More recently, Canon has been using its dot brand to drive a series of customer engagement initiatives, from marketing sites for one-off events (e.g. EXPO.CANON) to cloud-based image-sharing sites and even hobby sites, which customers can access for free once they have created a customer ID on MYID.CANON.
This log-in offers access to a series of online tools on the dot brand, such as CREATIVEPARK.CANON and POSTERARTIST.CANON.
The first of these provides paper craft materials to users of Canon PIXMA printers, attracting an estimated 10 million visitors around the world every year, including traffic from a free mobile app launched in November 2019.
Next came the launch of IMAGE.CANON in 2020, a replacement for Canon’s previous cloud-based photo storage solution Irista. Unlike the previous tool, which required a brand name for users to find it on the web (IRISTA.COM), Canon has used its dot brand to get straight to the point of the image-storage site. Not only does IMAGE.CANON automatically upload photos and videos to the cloud, but it also enables users to sync files instantly across connected devices and even post selected images to social network accounts.
