Customer Reviews

Ebrands: Building an Internet Business at Breakneck Speed

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I give up! I struggled to read through this book. Phil Carpenter attempts to present how Internet brands are developed by presenting "case studies" on six well-known companies. The marketing strategies of these companies (iVillage, CDNow, BarnesandNoble.com, Yahoo!, FogDog Sports, and OnSale) are detailed in a manner filled with "buzzwords" but little in the way of thoughtful analysis or performance measurement.
Carpenter follows the same business methodology of many Internet companies today in believing that "big numbers" translate into success. As we have seen this is a flawed formula. Further, the simplisitic discussions of banner ads, viral marketing, etc., provides little insight into eBrand management for your organization. Specifically, Carpenter never makes the connection between an eBrand and profit.
If you are attempting to formulate an internet-based marketing strategy a much better read is Seth Yodin's book on Permission Marketing.

Good stuff! The author offers an in-depth look at the marketing activities of some of the best-known players on the Web. I've read a lot of books on Internet marketing, and I particularly appreciated the fact that "eBrands" does not sugar coat the examples it uses. Where these companies have implemented strategies and tactics worth following, Carpenter lets you know. But he doesn't pull any punches, and when the case study companies have had problems (for example, he highlights iVillage's outrageous burn rate, to which marketing expenditures have been a big contributor), the writer highlights these isues. Definitely a good read for anyone responsible for driving the marketing activities of an Internet company.

The ideas here aren't rocket science at all, really basic. The examples of CDNow, Barnes and Noble, etc. as successes are hard to believe. I'm not really sure how this was determined. Not a whole lot of insight here in my opinion. I prefer Customers.com by Seybold and Building Strong Brands by Aakers.

I've read many of the Internet marketing books on the market, and this one stands out as a practical guide for marketers today. The lessons that Carpenter highlights are sound; it's a shame that more marketers don't understand the core of good marketing. The case studies are thorough and provide in-depth analysis of companies battling to build brands. I found this book to be salient, timely and real. Every marketing exec and manager should spend some time with this book.

"Branding on the Internet". If you go to any multi-day web seminar these days you will surely run into a class on this subject. Most of these classes spend a few hours talking about successful (and not) examples in the Internet without going into the research.

This book uses a similar approach. For the business/marketing person this book will be frustrating, with its basic findings (e.g. using a banner). The problem is this book was not meant for the marketing person as a lesson on how to brand their company on the Internet. This book was written for the web designer, as an introduction to branding.

The book itself has a problem in that the only company profiled that can be considered a success would be Yahoo! Anyone who uses the Internet regularly will recognize most of the other sites, but has anyone ever bought anything, or even visited these sites?

The author claims that when people are faced with unclear choices they will revert to what is comfortable, which is true. The question that arises is, other than Yahoo! do you feel comfortable with any of these companies. It seems the author chose second-tier websites because the top-tier weren't available.

The author offers interesting profiles of how six companies have gone online line. He highlights his take on what these companies do right and where they appear to fall short. But this isn't the type of book you'd be able to use as a guide to taking your own business online. There's not a lot here that's readily transferable to other businesses wanting to go online or to improve their current offerings. Still, as a snapshot in time, it makes for an interesting read.

I found "eBrands" to include marketing advice that would be helpful for start-ups and big companies alike. Also thought it was pretty well-written -- have read too many dry business books in my time, and this one was a nice contrast.