Promiscuous Customers: Invisible Brands - Delivering Value in Digital Markets [Paperback]

This book is good because it gets digital communications back into the mainstream of marketing brands and this is the first book I have read that helps the process by offering useful insights and ideas for improving brand performance, period.

The last century inflicted 3 big technical changes on brands: Radio, then Television and finally and still in process, the Internet ('digital everything'). Each change, in its turn, sent a shock wave through the marketing community that first rejected it, leaving its development to a few pioneers and finally, after many years, marketing embraced the new and learned to integrate it with all the other pre existing tools.

This return to the fold is now happening to digital and this is a book for everyone involved with brands and marketing communications; just about all of us one way or another. It is not primarily about digital at all but about the customer. With the customer at the centre it is full of ideas about how brands need to be managed in this unique era, one in which customers can and do talk back and one in which customer's interaction with the brand is more direct and more varied than it has ever been before.

It is not just the content. The structure, the layout of the book itself serves as an object lesson in good communication.

You can bombard me with advertising but unless the message is appropriately timed and delivered I will ignore it. Their vision of 'marketspaces' for the future of a genuine community of interest seems to hold water both for B2B and B2C worlds.

Read and join the debate. A courageous book. Tell your friends!

So how do you ensure you provide a good experience every time.

This book starts well with realisation that users come to a site for a specific reason and need to carry out tasks-sets in order to complete their objective.

The book then focuses on context of the data using the idea of a multi-modal model which basically states that information needs to be delivered to people in different ways in order to be relevant. This has just become part of the W3C as a workgroup activity. (2/02)

After this the book covers some new technologies -ontologies and XML but fails to talk about P3P (trust) and RDF.

The book also fails to provide a tangible framework for putting in place a framework to measure task success/failure and thus make improvements to enhance the experience.

What is needed is an updated Balanced ScoreCard covering tasks with measurements specific for the web.

Lastly a new area of importance is the use of Behavioural Marketing which uses real-time monitoring of users online to track their behavioural mood - angry, lost, frustrated etc. This when linked to RDF, URI and Intelligent Agents (Semantic Web)will improve the web experience and truly make it 1:1 marketing.

Read: Paco Underhill - Why we buy. B.Caldini - Influence and Balanced ScoreCard - Norton/Kaplan

Buy this book it is a great start but it has some way to go before we get to dynamic personalised web pages that use transivity. i.e Internet 4.0