eBrands: Building an Internet Business at Breakneck Speed (Hardcover)

~ Phil Carpenter (Author) "When Bonnie Sakadales's marriage broke up, she turned to the Internet for advice on raising her son and daughter alone..." (more)
Key Phrases: closeout goods, market intimacy, auction side, New York Times, Parent Soup, Jupiter Communications (more...)

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 (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,779,107 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 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

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.

14 of 15 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 (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (VINE VOICE)

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

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.