Customer Reviews

Clicks, Bricks and Brands: The Marriage of Retailer E-Tailer

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Lindstrom draws on speeches he's given in worldwide and textbook basics to craft an informative and refreshing marketing text. Highlighting the primary tools and techniques used by marketing professionals, he encourages companies to think about the true value of a clicks and mortar approach. Since it's cheaper to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one, companies should use all of the resources at their disposal - including marketing - in building long-term clicks and mortar relationships. Beyond the customer-value sermon, Lindstrom offers a systemic review of clicks and mortar concepts that have been very useful for me and which I can heartily recommend to beginners, who quickly will find their copies of this book glowing with highlighter yellow, as well as marketing veterans, who will enjoy and learn from the book's fresh take on familiar topics.

A concise overview on clicks and mortar principles is provided by the book. Despite the condensed nature of its content, many illustrative examples are given throughout the chapters. It serves well as a great introduction for readers who are planning to establish a clicks and mortar program.

I was very pleased with the quality of writing that went into this book. It provides a wealth of information in the clicks & mortar field space; not just the Internet paradigm, but as a business building methodology. I was very pleased.

What a remarkable and refreshing perspective on how to leverage the best from both worlds. I read this book after seeing it in the 'also read' section of another title I was searching for. It melded flawlessly with a solution and philosophy I believed in and had long been trying to create for our brand. The book goes beyond marketing into customer service, retention, and recurring sales. I believe it dovetails seamlessly into the sales technique of how you make such two different worlds work together. Definitely, a must read for those who believe that how you treat a customer is important no matte what channel they use.

I've have seen Martin Lindstrom at work for years and I'm not impressed.

His presentations and articles could appear in Cleo or Cosmo. The headline is intriguing but there is very little substance to them. Dig a little deeper and you find they are based on obvious trends, vast generalizations and marketing textbook ideas.

Zivo, which Martin ran in Australia, was renowned in the Industry for making grand promises at high prices with appalling implementation. While they were very successful for a while they got very little repeat business and the whole thing became a commercial disaster well before the dot com crash. This is probably why he had to go back to Europe for his next job.

Martin's real talent is as a sales man and self-promoter. He was one of the loudest carnival sprukers of the "dot com" era, proclaiming to one and all that the Internet was the miracle cure for all their corporate ills.

Martin seems to have a good grasp of e-marketing at the highest level but he is dangerously useless on business models, technology and implementation.

This book is ostensibly, about the world's most controversial marriage. No, not a celebrity power wedding, but the union of offline and online business. It seems not so long since books like this were urging businesses to flock to the web, but now the brakes are on. A new business model has risen from the ashes of the dotcoms: the marriage of bricks-and-mortar to the internet. Lindstrom whips readers through a potted history of the retail industry - the shopping evolution, as he terms it. A paragraph on the 1950s, half a page on the 1960s, a couple of case studies, a paragraph each on the 1980s and 1990s, and whammo, by page 10 we are into the age of the internet. But if detail is lacking, Lindstrom's argument is strong. By tracing the evolution of retail in this way he sets the scene for the e-tailing hype storm, pinpointing Christmas 1999 as the key test. 'The 2000 holiday season told a graphic tale,' he writes. 'More than 90 per cent of e-tailers closed down in the period up to January, 2001.' Each of the chapters in Clicks, Bricks and Brands is followed by a summary of the main points covered - useful for revision - and action points. For example, the action points at the end of The Power Shift (Chapter One), exhort the reader to do a SWOT analysis of their own and competitors' businesses. 'Summarise your business's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Determine what threats your offline or online store is facing from your competitors and what features would be most likely to lure your customers to your competitor.' This is before we get into the substance of the book - the meat and potatoes of clicks and mortar. Even if it all seems a bit Cleo magazine (does your boyfriend really love you?), the self-analysis you will have accumulated by the end of the book should be formidable. The innumerable case studies are breezy, informative, well-written and succinct. By Chapter Five we are right down into the central proposition - that the best chance of success in the coming paradigm is the combination of clicks and mortar enterprises. The good news, though, is that the onus need not be carried by any single business. There are lots of case studies of partnerships involving an online service and bricks-and-mortar outfits. For example: 'When Drugstore.com teamed up with Rite Aid, Drugstore.com suddenly gained 3500 distribution centres around the US. 'Rite Aid, on the other hand, gained access to Drugstore. com's online databases and web presence.' This book points the way for enterprises on the threshold of web presence. Lindstrom brings analysis, insight and market skill to an area that inspires fear in many, pointing out along the way that this fear could be a costly indulgence. He sets out a straightforward path to overcoming many of the obstacles that might otherwise lead 21st-century enterprises to the scrap heap. Simply Spot On!

If the whole dotcom, online, e-commerce, broadband, WAP, interactive, etailing, one-to-one, digital scenario is still a bit fuzzy, Martin Lindstrom's book might be of help. Clicks, Bricks & Brands is an approachable but sweeping overview of the ups and downs of doing business online and offline, and how consumers and business customers are dealing with the issue. It is loaded with learnings derived from the success and failure of companies around the world that have either got e-commerce right, plain wrong or have been forced to embrace a new 'clicks and bricks' approach. The book is stacked with anecdotes and trends that will trigger plenty of scenarios for imaginative proprietors unsure about where online technology fits into their business, if at all. Lindstrom has trawled the world assembling bits of data and case studies which help build a big-picture view for those of us not exposed 24 hours a day to the changes in the digital arena. Sometimes it is the crumbs that feed the family. Small retailers, for instance, should take some comfort in the fact that consumers are far less inclined to travel to category-killer retail superstores than they used to. Clicks, Bricks & Brands is attempting something very new in the book-publishing industry: it is the world's first 'dual book' - that means content will also go online and be updated weekly. For small and medium enterprises, it could prove a smart intelligence resource (see breakout). I have used the concept almost daily when researching for new knowledge about Clicks & Mortar or branding. A great concept and a great book which I can recommend everyone to read.

The information presented in this book, is like its style and presentation, simple, immediately accessible and implementable.

The book may not apply to highly trained and experienced web designers, but will serve as a terrific information source for non-ICT people that need to get an immediate grasp of the key concepts, the terminology, the possible applications and ultimately in implementing the strategies and ideas.

This book gives professionals and students an excellent introduction and overview on clicks and mortar, on analysis of opportunities, development of marketing and branding strategies and on planning, implementation and control of marketing programs. There is a focus on the traditional marketing process and there are good examples on many topics in the book.

Well written, easy to read with examples, and quite innovative.
This book will appeal to those who prefer the visualisation of models and concepts alongside in depth examples, and the format will be particularly liked by those whom have followed an MBA degree or similar training.
The book is a step-by-step manual as well as a very detailed review of the changes we can expect to see in the future within the world of clicks and mortar.