West Monroe Partners pays $275,000 to acquire WMP.com domain
West Monroe Partners have spent $275,000 on a new website domain. WMP.com, which will soon replace its current westmonroepartners.com domain, will enable the firm to improve accessibility for new clients, while expediting employee email processes.
In a notable deal in the online domains landscape, North American West Monroe have acquired the domain name for $275,000. The broker that advised on the deal, Sedo, describes the transaction as a "great deal" for the consulting firm, as it will help WMP to improve its online branding and web presence.
While outside the world of business $275,000 might seem a high price to pay for a web address, the consultancy, which currently uses the domain name westmonroepartners.com, will be glad of the added simplicity of their new digital home. WMP.com is not only notably more easy to search for and find, from a client’s perspective, but it is also a major time-saver when it comes to reaching employees via email. WMP employees currently use email monikers ending in @westmonroepartners.com, which likely causes substantial misdirection of mail due to misspellings, while frustrating customers and employees alike with its length.
The consultancy was also short on alternatives when it came to finding a new domain, making the WMP the only logical domain it still could purchase. WestMonroe.com, for example, not only retains the spelling issue, but is also presently owned by a city of the same name in Louisiana so obtaining the rights to that name was unlikely. As it stands, the $275,000 sum for WMP.com works out at around $275 per head, when weighed against WMP’s 1,000 strong employee base.
The consulting industry often prioritises abreviation for the sake of boosting business. Ernst & Young and PricewatershouseCoopers, for example, rebranded as EY and PwC, with the latter specifically choosing the option for the sake of using pwc.com and other variants of the same for online and email access. Bain and McKinsey have dropped ‘& company’ from their domains ever since the start of online era, while the Boston Consulting Group also uses bcg.com. In a more complex matter, when Strategy& launched in 2014, the strategic wing of PwC turned its domain into strategyand.com, as the & symbol cannot be reproduced in web addresses.
At the same time, competition for long web domains can present challenges too. In 2012 Bain & Company started a lawsuit against the owner of the website BainConsultingGroup.com. According to Bain, the owner, Jim Woods, had infringed Bain's copyright and trademark by using "Bain Consulting", and utilising the website for business purposes.
