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17 of 19 found the following review helpful:
 Helpful eMarketing insights May 13, 2000
By ed roland
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 found the following review helpful:
An Invaluable Single-Volume Resource Aug 29, 2000
By Robert Morris
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 found the following review helpful:
A thorough look at brand development Jun 15, 2000
By robin carpenter
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.
13 of 16 found the following review helpful:
 Offers Little to the Marketer Oct 12, 2000
By Eric Eskin
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.
7 of 8 found the following review helpful:
Excellent case studies for online marketers May 13, 2000
By steven collins
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.
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