Ebrands: Building an Internet Business at Breakneck Speed [Hardcover]

Phil Carpenter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2000

This book contains essential strategies for building powerful eBrands. At the turn of the millennium, myriad companies have filled the Web with more than 800 million pages of content. Overwhelmed by choice and starved for time, customers are casting their clicks with brands they trust. The companies that win their wallets will be those that invest now in building premier electronic brands, or 'eBrands'. While scores of books have promoted various Internet marketing tactics and Web site design rules, none has provided the necessary strategic context in which true eBrand builders make names for themselves. Through thoughtful analysis of the overall marketing strategies of six Web innovators - Yahoo!, CDNow, iVillage, Onsale, Barnesandnoble.com, and Fogdog Sports - veteran Silicon Valley marketing executive Phil Carpenter takes a hard look at how a core set of companies have pushed to develop powerful Internet brands. Carpenter takes readers backstage in his in-depth interviews with more than forty company executives and industry experts. Recounting the successes, failures, and fears of eBrand pioneers, the author assesses the opportunities and vulnerabilities of his case study companies compared to those of their on- and offline competitors. His analysis shows how several 'pure play' Internet ventures have established brand awareness and credibility, how an offline leader has boldly asserted itself in this new medium, and how a start-up has battled to distinguish its brand among the many deeper-pocketed players. Carpenter argues that Internet contenders must expand their notion of branding far beyond such assets as logotypes, trademarks, and brand names to include programs for building brand awareness, forging alliances, and cultivating customer loyalty, to name a few. Through these bedrock best practices distilled from the experiences of the online elite, even a dot.com nobody can become a cyberbranded star. For anyone with a stake in ebusiness - from CEOs to entrepreneurs, from marketers to customer service and PR specialists, and from venture capitalists to financial analysts - "eBrands" will prove a thoughtful guide to creating truly durable brands in the electronic marketplace.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Internet and brands are probably the two hottest business topics of the moment. So Phil Carpenter's timely book eBrands, which looks at building brands on the Internet, scores a double whammy on the business groove-o-meter. Carpenter, director of corporate marketing for Silicon Valley start-up Remarq, foregoes the theoretical, business-school approach in favor of the more easily absorbed case-study method, with detailed analysis, interviews, and behind-the-scenes peeks at six Internet businesses that have already established themselves successfully as brands. They include Yahoo!, Fogdog Sports, iVillage, and Barnesandnoble.com.

Carpenter's basic argument is: "In an environment characterized by extreme choice, perplexed customers will turn to the familiar. They will establish relationships with specific Internet brands and do business with them repeatedly." The book is thoroughly researched. In fact, it's amazing Carpenter got his subjects to share so openly and honestly, not only their learning but also the details of their mistakes. For instance, he writes of online CD retailer CDNow's customer acquisition program, "CDNow is already paying an average of $45 per person for each new customer.... this puts even more pressure on CDNOW to wring greater value from online shoppers".

Carpenter makes much of the point that a brand is far more than a logo or marquee and includes everything the company does, from publicity to answering the phone to order fulfillment. While it's an argument that will be old hat to anybody with a marketing background, it's a point well made for those coming from a more technical or general business environment--as many net entrepreneurs tend to do. This is an excellent marketing primer for anyone who needs to know how to make e-business work. --Alex Benady, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

Applying traditional business analysis to the realities of the new economy, Carpenter presents marketing case studies of six Internet firms to explain how brand making is conducted in the world of e-commerce. The music purveyor CDNow successfully adapted the old-fashioned hardsell by peppering customers with follow-up e-mails encouraging them to buy more. Yet Fogdog Sports tried more or less the same thing for sports equipment with less success. According to Carpenter (a Silicon Valley marketing director), Barnesandnoble.com has made its mark with Avis's old "number two tries harder" strategy, positioning Amazon.com as its Hertz. Unlike the first three, Yahoo! and iVillage were never bricks-and-mortar stores; their marketing tactics reflect their greater understanding of the Internet medium. Yahoo! staked out prime Internet real estate and defended it successfully with a combination of sharp personality and technical innovation; iVillage draws customers into interactive relationships with content, creating an umbrella organization of branded virtual spaces like Parent Soup and Better Health. Meanwhile, OnSale.com was an early online auction site that missed out on the growth of that business and is now merging with failed bricks-and-mortar computer retailer, Egghead, in an Internet retail venture. From these cases, Carpenter extracts several valuable lessons (among them, pay attention to the power of momentum and forge strong content alliances), but the book's format and organization is more likely to appeal to business school students than to practicing marketers. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Press (May 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0875849296
• ISBN-13: 978-0875849294
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,104,184 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Helpful eMarketing insights, May 13, 2000

By 

ed roland - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ebrands: Building an Internet Business at Breakneck Speed (Hardcover)

Just finished reading Carpenter's book and really enjoyed it. I work for an offline company that is attempting to build brand awareness on the Web, and as a result, I was particularly interested in his chapter on Barnesandnoble.com. I've read story after story about Amazon.com. But this is one of the first detailed accounts I've ever found of how Barnesandnoble.com has worked to build an Internet brand that would complement its brick-and-mortar brand. Most writers take a pretty superficial view of Barnesandnoble.com -- they take the easy way out and write the "david and goliath" story. This book reveals the company's mistakes, alright, but it also highlights the smart choices that Barnesandnoble.com has made.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Invaluable Single-Volume Resource, August 29, 2000

By 

Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ebrands: Building an Internet Business at Breakneck Speed (Hardcover)

As Carpenter explains, his book "is based on an analysis of the brand-building efforts of six companies. Four of them, which represent the core of the book, are established Internet ventures that rose to the challenge of developing brands distinctly for this new medium." The six are: iVillage, CDNOW, Barnesandnoble.com, Yahoo!, Fogdog Sports, and Onsale. Carpenter does a brilliant job of explaining what each did right...and what each did wrong. In process, he rigorously examines a number of best practices common to all:

Focus on Building Brand Awareness

Cultivate Customer Commitment

Forge Strong Distribution and Content Alliances

Move Early, Move Fast

Develop an Intimate Knowledge of the Market and the Customer

Cultivate a Reputation for Excellence

Deliver Outstanding Value

Carpenter devotes a separate chapter to each of the six companies. In the Conclusion, he suggests that "the development of an Internet brand is a holistic process. Building awareness -- the activity that many equate with `branding' -- is just one aspect of brand development. Crafting a powerful online brand requires paying just as much attention to developing other facets of brand as well, such as customer loyalty and influential distribution partnerships. There is no silver bullet solution for the development of a substantial Internet brand. Instead, dominant ebrands emerge when companies invest in a rich mixture of marketing and business practices." If there is a better book on this subject, I have not as yet read it.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A thorough look at brand development, June 15, 2000

By 

robin carpenter - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ebrands: Building an Internet Business at Breakneck Speed (Hardcover)

Liked the "eBrands" perspective on brand development. Forging a brand on the Web is much more than building a flashy site or picking a sharp name. The brand ties back to almost everything you do -- how you treat your customers, the offers you extend them, etc.

Found this book to have good parallels with "Customers.com," which I also enjoyed. Much more useful than the new "11 immutable laws of branding" -- at least for someone in Internet land. The Internet is changing too fast for anything to be immutable, in my opinion.