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G. Raghavan

Firebr@nds Building brand loyalty in the Internet Age By Michael Moon with Doug Millison Publishers: Tata McGraw Hill, New Delhi Price: Rs 375

Networked economy is the order of the day. There are no official statistics about the number of Web sites, but estimates exceed over one million. Every business organisation is rushing ahead to establish their Web sites. The Internet became a highly preferred medium in an environment that was vastly different from the marketing environment. This has turned the traditional marketing beliefs upside down and is touted to bring about a total revolution in the way organisations purchase and sell goods.

The emergence of trust networks mean that businesses must re-engineer the core processes that they use to find and serve customers. In the past, companies could address brands and brand building as a set of communications activities that paralleled the real work of the firm — designing, making and delivering products and services. In the networked economy, these parallel tracks converge.

In this background, there was a felt need for some authentic information, check list and clear road map for companies to go `online brand marketing and building brand loyalty' in this Internet age.

Michael Moon and Doug Millison, the creators and authors of Firebr@nds, have come out with an excellent treatise on brand building in the Internet age. The very coining of the name (@ instead of a) itself is very novel, apt and expresses the contents of the book in a very subtle manner.

This book provides for a very clear, concise definition of branding, combined with a firebrand-positioning model. This book would be an invaluable fund of information for those marketing professionals, who are responsible for creating, building and retaining brands in the new, trust network-centric digital world that is simply called internet.

The book explains what happens to the relationship between buyer and seller in the networked economy (the businesses that find and serve customers using the internet and an array of related information technologies) and the impact these changes have on brands and brand building Three strands of authors' work stand distinctly apart — the impact that information technology has on individuals and the organisations that employ them; the dynamics of individual psychological developments and interpersonal relationships; and how businesses in a free-market society can act as powerful agents for positive change and social justice.

The first chapter on Firebrands and the new brand estate explains the radical changes that necessitate a new definition of brands and the new approach to building brands have been examined in detail. In the second chapter on Brand fundamentals, why traditional definitions of brands fail to meet the challenge of the networked economy have been discussed in detail. How buyers and sellers collaborate in the creation of a brand, and why the relationship between buyer and seller has become so important have been brought out. Beyond customers, several other groups who have a stake in a company's brand and why brand managers must consider their needs have been covered.

Thus, the brands from both the sell side and the buy side, from the customers' point of view as well as the brand manager perspective have been analysed threadbare. In the chapter that follows on `Building Brands Offline' — the branding tradition, the authors go on to explain how organisations build brands and defines the relationship between a product or service and its brand. They take pain to accentuate the need to create a crisp, focused positioning for the brand with a clear message to brand managers to understand the effect that corporate lifecycles exert on brands.

In the main chapter of the book on Firebr@nds, the authors come out with their best on what makes a firebrand and clearly establishes how the resources, services and self-service satisfactions create a firebrand.

They further elaborate how and where firebrands live, how they work and who they serve. They have also made a few suggestions to put such firebrands in the company's valuation including how to use loyalty lock-ins and value based pricing to multiply firebrand equity.

In the concluding chapter, the authors introduce the hype curve as a way to help filter and parse the essential developments that lie behind business and trade press headlines. They further offer concrete but generally applicable advice to guide strategic and tactical decisions and help future-proof fire-branding efforts. Finally, they introduce an overarching law of firebrands and put firebrands in the larger context of culture and the new brand estate.

Thus this book is a manifesto to the chief executives as to how they can engage and succeed in the networked economy. Their employees also need to understand what makes the changes necessary, who makes the changes happen, and what should happen during each step of a successful fire-branding programme. In this respect, this book is a must in the library and archives of every corporate that claim to be modern and a trendsetter.

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