The committed enterprise
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and inexperienced e-businesses collapsing under the burden of financial responsibilities, the editors maintain that e-commerce will survive and prosper. They define the scope of the book as exploring the online potential of brands to: build communities of consumers who can gather and discuss information about brands; give consumers control of pricing and purchasing as never before; become global without the need for international shops and offices; save advertising costs through being able to target specific audiences; gather valuable consumer information through online research; provide the most effective combination of online and offline marketing; develop brands and brand strategies specifically for online business; and protect against the online misuse of trademarks and brand names. Bojana Fazarinc, formerly Director of Global Marketing Services and Brand Management at Hewlett-Packard, kicks off proceedings with an excellent chapter assessing the extent to which the fundamentals of branding have and have not changed in light of the Internet explosion. She believes that instead of a branding revolution, the Internet has created a stimulating rapid evolution of branding’s basic concepts, strengthening and expanding their relevance to business and customers. The brand promise for an
䉷 HENRY STEWART PUBLICATIONS 1350-231X BRAND MANAGEMENT VOL. 10, NO. 1, 79–87 SEPTEMBER 2002
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expected customer experience remains, but what has changed is that today the brand promise has many more possible moments of truth than ever before. Fazarinc’s conclusion is that the brand promise must, therefore, be more intricately interwoven with business strategy and all its supporting functions. This does not, she warns, mean using the Internet as a content repository — throwing pre-existing content on the Internet, coding it to HTML, and letting customers try to sort through it all, is not a compelling way for customers to appreciate the company and the brand. Another Internet-enabled evolution for branding observed by Fazarinc concerns the changing nature of the brand experience. Whereas, before, the brand experience spanned the period between a customer’s awareness and purchase of a product, now the brand experience is increasingly the beginning of an ongoing relationship including an array of after-market loyalty services that include, but overshadow, the physical product. A word of warning is sounded, though, regarding the false economy of cutting out the salesperson in order to gain cost efficiencies, leaving the customers on their own to navigate through websites to make a purchase — Fazarinc claims that 65 per cent of the sales transactions across all industries that are initiated online are abandoned because, generally at the last moment, there is a question or navigation issue that has not been appropriately designed or executed to make it easy for the customer to get the last-minute reassurance to close the sale. In a chapter titled, ‘From retailing to e-tailing’, David B. Green, Senior Vice President of Mark
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