Firebrands: Building Brand Loyalty in the Internet Age
318
Firebrands: Building Brand Loyalty in the Internet Age
318eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780072133066 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | McGraw Hill LLC |
| Publication date: | 09/07/2000 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 318 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1: Firebrands and the new Brand eState
The Emergence of Trust Networks and Their Implications for Branding What does the Internet mean for brand managers and executives? How has the process of finding and serving customers changed?The answers to these questions lie in an examination of the principle effects that the Internet has on commerce, society, and the individual. Let's begin with the profound insight of management guru, economist, and theorist, Peter Drucker. He divides modern economic history into five eras. As illustrated in Figure 1-1, Drucker defines each era in terms of a single organizing principle-how the successful commercial enterprises of that era organize work and productivity, where productivity connotes the systematic application of knowledge to work.
During the first era, companies set up operations on or near plentiful natural resources, including harbors, lakes, rivers, mines, and forests. Their competitive advantage came from knowing how to exploit these natural resources-usually by staking claims before anyone else could, protecting those claims from encroachment by others, and employing tremendous amounts of manual labor to reap the prized resources.
In the industrial production era, success came through access to labor pools, technical knowledge of manufacturing, and convenient, low cost transportation for raw materials and finished goods. Recently, the Nobel Committee awarded its economic prize to the economist who showed that the United States pulled ahead of Europe in the Industrial Revolution because its network of rivers and canals ensured steady supplies of raw materials and ways to move finished goods to markets both local and abroad.
The era of mass markets arose with the emergence of an interstate rail and highway system along with the development of newspapers, magazines, radio, film, and television. Trains and trucks provided highly efficient ways of moving inexpensive, mass-produced goods throughout a national market stimulated by advertising and promotion. Competitive advantage derived from mastering the logistics of nationwide transportation systems (designing products for shipment and distribution through an expanding network of retailers and field sales organizations), and from advertising, publicity, and promotion (novel sources of entertainment at that time, welcomed by consumers hungry for news and cultural developments beyond the parochial scope of their towns and neighborhoods).
Drucker marks the beginning of the information era in 1955, when enterprises began to organize work and productivity in terms of the creation and use of information. He coined the term "knowledge worker" to characterize a new form of labor: a worker who produces and consumes information as the principle focus of the job. Competitive advantage derived from information technology (IT) infrastructure (in particular, specialized computer software) and the quality of the data that knowledge workers could transform into business intelligence and answers. Because these information systems undergird the means of production, distribution, and customer interactions, better-trained knowledge workers and superior IT systems conferred great advantages to the firms that mastered these two elements.
Drucker argues that each age lasts about 40 years; and that each provides a meaningful context for understanding the previous age. He notes that while immersed in the current era, people have a hard time understanding the organizing principal of that era. Like water to a fish or air to a bird, the operating principle of the current era remains hidden behind the veil of tranquilized obviousness.
Drucker wryly notes that, following this timeline, the information era ended in 1995. He says that we now find ourselves in a new era with a fundamentally new organizing principle for work and productivity. He laments that he can smell and taste but not name this new organizing principle. He nonetheless asserts that the new organizing principle should have sufficient explanatory power to quantify the economic value of information-something that remained impossible while we stayed immersed in the information era...