eBrands: Building an Internet Business at Breakneck Speed

Author: Phil Carpenter
List Price: $25.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0875849296
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press (May, 2000)
Sales Rank: 12,516
Average Customer Rating: 4.14 out of 5

Customer Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5
An Invaluable Single-Volume Resource
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.

Rating: 5 out of 5
Kind of funny given current market....but a good eBook still
This author is very knowledgeable about Silicon Valley and has some great insights. He picked Yahoo!, CDNow, iVillage, Onsale, Barnesandnoble.com, and Fogdog Sports to show how quickly a powerful brand could be built with the web growing like it was. Problem is...only one of these brands still matters - Yahoo.

Still the book is a must read for anyone trying to create a standalone branded website or online service. Gives some pretty compelling tips and histories on what works and doesn't. Also like the eBook format for this one...you'll want to skim and bookmark and highlight and the eBook Reader is pretty helpful for that. Recommended.

Rating: 4 out of 5
Clear overview of e-branding
Phil Carpenter has set up a very well-written, easy-to-read, book about the various aspects of marketing an e-business. By offering a load of examples, he helps the reader with quickly identifying the possibilities of online of offline branding. What he might have added, to add some quantitative research, is some more figures concerning investments, as percentage of revenue. Furthermore it would have been interesting to see that the investements are worth it, so the relation between investment patterns and sales. Concluding: this book offers a good marketing overview, and offers some new insides, worthy to be explored.

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