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"Brandwidth," according to Sergio Zyman and Scott Miller, is a steeping brew of "brand awareness," "brand meaning," and "brand power" designed specifically for just one thing: making the sale in cyberspace. In Building Brandwidth, former Coca-Cola marketing chief Zyman and political and corporate strategist Miller present simple but solid rules for harnessing this mixture to really move merchandise online. As in Zyman's well-received previous book The End of Marketing As We Know It, this volume considers as marketing virtually every step in the branding process up to the eventual sale--without which, the authors note logically, the entire effort fails. "You may be doing a $2 million ad on the Super Bowl," they explain, "but you're not doing e-marketing if you're not doing e-selling." And it is for the current phase of e-marketing--which Zyman and Miller believe opened in spring 2000, when even the most promising dot-coms were suddenly expected to begin turning profits or kiss their investment dollars goodbye--that this advice is aimed. There's a good deal of go-go inspirational prose here, but also much practical advice for explaining a product or service, enhancing its value, distinguishing it from its competitors, and connecting it with the appropriate consumers. --Howard Rothman 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.
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