Many of my posts have a small business slant, because I empathize with these companies that have to stretch every marketing dollar they can spare. They usually don't have the big budgets to do a huge branding and awareness campaign and projecting a certain level of professionalism is key to instilling confidence in potential clients. When the Web first took off, many small businesses signed up with these massive ASPs to get a free web page to promote their business. Companies like GeoCities would give businesses a domain name like (http://www.geocities.com/bakery/mycupcakeshop/) to host their homepage. As people got more sophisticated, the rules of branding said that you must have your own top level domain name (http://www.mybusiness.com) and your email address had to have the same domain name (service@mybusiness.com). This branding needed to extend to your business cards, letterhead and the list went on and on. These ideas were sound then and still make sense today. I cringe when I see a business with a homepage hosted under someone else's domain. Web hosting and purchasing a domain name is so cheap there is almost no excuse. And for big companies, there is absolutely no excuse.
So I was a little surprised when I took my son to IHOP for their Kids Eat Free promotion to get a receipt with a "Gmail" email address. I applaud them for providing an email address to let them know how they did, but why the "IHOPSERVICE@GMAIL.COM" address. IHOP already owns the domain name IHOP.com, so why not have a dedicated IHOP.com address for feedback. I cannot verify if this is just the restaurant near my location or nationwide. IHOP is a franchise so it could be this franchisee is just being proactive about collecting feedback and is not able to get an email account on the IHOP.com domain. If that is the case, then I can cut the franchisee some slack, but maybe IHOP should develop a company wide strategy to ensure all franchisees can have a dedicated email address for feedback on their restaurant. A common form where all submitters had to select their restaurant would also work too.
But what do I know, this is a minor inconvenience if my son gets to eat FREE!
Comments