Building Brandwidth: Closing the Sale Online

Now the world's most famous marketer, Sergio Zyman, has teamed up with Scott Miller to present a brilliant and irascible take on e-marketing as it really is and how it's supposed to be.
just as Zyman's best-selling The End of Marketing as We Know It signaled the end of traditional marketing-marketing as corporate ornamentation, somehow existing apart from the serious business practice of selling more people more stuff more often-Building Brandwidth takes on the myth that this cool, hip new technology needs cool, hip new marketing to make the sale. Marketing is marketing-building a brand online takes discipline and sweat, just as it does offline.
Too many Internet start-ups are betting on irreverent advertising and in-jokes to do magic-to create instant brand awareness, build traffic, develop commerce, create buzz, and enable the brand to rise to the top. But "irreverent" too often means "irrelevant." Meanwhile, sales stagnate-or nosedive. Ever since the Internet bubble burst, Web companies live by the law-of-the-jungle rules of all companies.

In this illuminating book you'll learn why:

• Building brandwidth isn't about being trendy. It's about closing the sale online and using some of the back-to-the principles of e-merchanting to do that.

• Everything you knew about mass marketing is over. Today, customization rules, and that means customer-ization rules.

• Customers don't care if your Web site has the coolest technology-they want to know how it can do something for them that they need or want and how it can do it differently than any other site.

• Creativity isn't about being obscure. Creativity means doing the hard work of communicating what your business can do that the competition can't.

• What applies to e-companies now applies to all companies. The new and old economies have fused into one hypercompetitive transformed economy.

Building Brandwidth is the user's manual for anyone doing business on the Internet. This indispensable guide to making money and coming out on top will help you close the sale online in these fast-moving, make-or-break times when every e-commerce venture is desperately fighting to stay afloat.