eBusiness: The Hope, the Hype, the Power, the Pain
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(© Jack M. Wilson,
1999, 2000) |
According to The American Marketing Association, marketing is:
“The process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives.”
The timeless exhortation of marketing is “Know thy customer,” and there has never before been a tool for getting to know the customer, like the internet. Getting to know the customer is a pre-requisite for classic business strategies like targeted marketing, differential pricing, and versioning. While in the past targeted marketing focused on characteristics of groups, today it can focus on the characteristics of individuals. You must have noticed how web advertisements seem to be linked to your actions on the screen. Customers who display bargain-hunting tendencies tend to get advertisements that tempt them through bargains. Banner ads seem to be designed just for you! Users of Amazon.com get recommendations of new books based upon their past reading patterns. Banner ads on the search sites are often keyed to where you have visited in the past.
eBusiness technologies allow business to know their customer far more intimately than has ever been possible before. The available data collection techniques combined with the use of mass customization of eCommerce sites allows businesses to adopt one to one marketing techniques that had been practical in the past.
Because of the low barriers to entry of competitors, the perceived “first mover advantage,” and the feeling that any competitor was only a “click away” from your customers, the internet generated an intense need for marketing and brand awareness that created lucrative opportunities for traditional media such as newspaper, magazines, television, and bill boards. The paradox was that the new communications technologies that were supposed to kill them were instead enriching them!
The American Association of Marketing defines marketing as: … “the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals.[1]”
Traditional marketing refers to the all-important 4 “P’s” - product, pricing, place (placement or distribution), and promotion. These are the elements of the “marketing mix.” To the outsider, promotion tends to dominate the marketing agenda, but the real trick is to use these four elements to create a marketing program that enables the exchange with consumers in the marketplace. The underlying rules of marketing do not change on the Internet, but the way the marketing mix can be deployed changes radically. For a nice on-line exposition of basic marketing 101, you might have a look at: http://www.marketingmonthly.com/basics.htm .
Product or service: Marketing helps to define the product or service and then match that product or service to a customer need. There is a two way street between product development and marketing rather than serial relationship in which the product is developed and then thrown over the wall to marketing. Marketing has a critical role in defining the product itself. A firm can spend large sums of money on advertising or sales promotion, but it stands little chance of success if the product is of poor quality, is priced improperly, or does not have adequate distribution and availability to consumers. Marketing has a role in ensuring product suitability to the market
Price: The “holy grail” of pricing is to charge each customer exactly the maximum price he/she is willing to pay. This differential pricing or dynamic pricing can be done through versioning of products. A microprocessor manufacturer may release a lower functionality version of their microprocessor at a lower price even though the cost of producing that device is the same or even more than the higher function version. The airline industry is the master at differential pricing for different customers. Two passengers may be sitting side by side and one of them has paid three times as much as the other. In this case, the versioning may be seen as either due to earlier purchase, more flexibility in flight times, or willingness to buy on-line.
Priceline.com took this approach by introducing the reverse auction or “name you own price” system. The purchaser tells Priceline the maximum price he or she is willing to pay. The airline tells Priceline the minimum price it will accept. Priceline makes the deal and pockets the difference. If the buyer’s price is not higher than the sellers offer, Priceline declines the sale.
Baker et. al. in Harvard Business Review have show how eCommerce allows three approaches to improved pricing through precision, adaptability, and segmentation.[2] Precision is placing the price at the right point within the range of pricing indifference. There is a range of prices within which consumers do not pay much attention. Pricing at the top of this range can make a big difference for profits. Adpatabiloity allows one to change prices quickly to adapt to shifts in demand. Segmentation allows different prices to be charged for different kinds of consumers. This is a powerful tool, but it must be wielded with exquisite care.
Dynamic Pricing can be very controversial. When Amazon.com was found to be selling both DVD players and CD’s to different customers at different prices, there was a customer uprising that led to an Amazon.com apology.[3]
Place or distribution: Product placement can be the item that makes or breaks a product. The traditional example cited is shelf space in the supermarket or retailer. This gives the large chains like Wal-Mart enormous power with suppliers. If the suppliers cannot get the product placement, they cannot get the sales.
In the PC-Era the equivalent situation was software shelf space at the stores. Those software companies that could not get shelf space could not get sales. This broke down rather dramatically when the internet enabled creators to go directly to consumers far more easily than they had in the past. As the Internet retailing space became more and more crowded, the ability to gain attention became more and more difficult. Eventually it became critical for suppliers to gain placement on one of the more popular portals such as Yahoo, AOL, Amazon, or MSN.
The meteoric rise in popularity is an interesting case in point. Started as a very small distribution investment newsletter by two brothers, the Motley Fool was given prominent placement on AOL in the early days. The rest, as they say, is history. The Motley Fool became one of the most popular investment sites on the Internet and eventually out grew its need for AOL.[4]
Promotion: Promotion is best viewed as the communication function of marketing and is accomplished through a promotional mix that includes:[5]
· advertising,
· personal selling,
· publicity/public relations,
· sales promotion, and
· direct marketing.
Promotion is often seen by outsiders as the primary function of marketing, but without the other three “P’s,” the marketing function would be difficult to accomplish.
There are few simple things that any B2C eCommerce site must do to be successful. These actions are not much different for B2B sites, but the effects are usually clearer in the B2C cases. The requisite actions for an eCommerce site include:
1. Make them aware of your site.
2. Get them to your site.
3. Get them engaged immediately
4. Provide a structure and navigation system that leads them in the most productive directions and avoids dead ends.
5. Keep them interested.
6. Close the sale.
7. Leave them wanting to come back for more.
It is obvious that a deep knowledge of the customer is a key to each part of this strategy. It may not be as immediately obvious, but product selection is just as important. If we consider each of these in turn we can gain an overall picture of what it might take be a successful eCommerce site.
Make them aware of your site. The ironic part of the entire eCommerce surge is that it has generated huge growth in traditional advertising media. In some regions, especially California and the Boston area, billboard advertising has surged with large ads touting the latest “CompanyoftheDay.com” in the hope that commuters will see the billboards and rush home to log in and see what you’ve got. Clever advertisements in magazines try to get you to put down the magazine and log into their site. AOL has barraged the market with “free” CD-ROMS that allow you to connect to their network for free (at least for a short time). The plan, of course, is to hook you as a regular customer who will pay something like $22 per month ot connect to their network, IM (send instant messages to) your friends and read their advertisements. Television advertising is both the most expensive route and one of the most imaginative. Each football Super Bowl in the United States is an exhibition of the most creative and imaginative ad agencies approaches to building brand awareness.
The perceived need for “first mover advantage” and the relentless effects of Metcalf’s law combine to make eRetailers, in particular, nearly desperate for brand awareness and access to customer eyeballs. This has led to some kinds of marketing that can only be described as desperation marketing.
Paradoxically, many of the greatest examples of building brand awareness came not from traditional marketing approaches but were much more the result of the “virus like” spread by word of mouth that has now become know as “viral marketing.” Yahoo, eBay, AltaVista, and Netscape were all sites that benefited from the effects of viral marketing.
Get them to your site. Once aware of your site, the customer needs to be able to get there easily and quickly. In this regard, an easy to remember and type web name is an enormous asset. This can be one area beside awareness) in which the established players have a distinct advantage over the newly established eBusinesses. It is much easier to find www.ibm.com than it is to find www.penguincomputing.com. When addresses were limited to .com, .net, .org, and .edu in the United States, this led to a new economy land rush to stake out claims to easy to remember or very familiar names. At first there was some confusion over rights to names and how that related to trademark and brand names, but eventually a process was set up that made it a bit easier for established brands and trademarks to reclaim their names on the internet as well. During this period there was a real opportunity for the cybersquatters to grab established names and then sell them back to the owners for a handsome profit. EBusinesses soon learned that they had to move quickly to protect their names and also to acquire any other names that might be confused with them or used to embarrass them. It was not enough to own IBM.com, but you also had to acquire IBMSucks.com to avoid embarrassment. This was often hard to do since there are so many ways to alter common names. Whitehouse.com is a familiar example of a failure to protect a name. Many embarrassed parents found that using the .com suffix rather than the .gov suffix took them to a pornography site rather than the residence of the U.S. President.
Other companies took advantage of common misspelling to siphon off a few of the customers from the most popular sites. A site called Yahho.com could attract a certain percentage of the millions of visitors who visited yahoo.com every day.
Get them engaged immediately. Once you get them to your site, you usually have only a few
seconds to engage the customer in your site.
If they come looking for Pokemon and you cannot provide it, then you had
better present an attractive alternative very quickly. Failure to engage the customer leads to many
events in which a potential customer
enters a site and leaves within seconds.
Provide a structure and navigation system that leads them in the most productive directions and avoids dead ends. If the site takes forever to load and then presents an opaque interface, the site is unlikely to lead to much sales activity. People are impatient and not willing to devote a lot of time to learning about a site. They want to get in, find what they want, and get out quickly. This can lead to some real design time paradoxes. Many design focused marketing consultants want to bring the look and feel of the brand to the Web. Although this focus on the brand identity is generally a good thing, it can be a challenge for web design. Highly designed sites with lots of graphics can be very slow to load over any small bandwidth connection, and most persons today still connect to the internet over POTS (plain old telephone systems). Finding the right tradeoff between design and speed can be critical. Yahoo is a site that is known to favor speed over design. Although their sites are not the most beautiful to be found on the Internet, they generally get the users what they want quickly and with minimal fuss.
Keep them interested. Getting customers to stay and then to return again and again is one of the most difficult and important tasks for designers of eCommerce systems. There are several strategies used to do this. Keeping the information on the site fresh and up-to-date is an entry-level requirement. Many sites do not present anything new to the user on the return visit, and the customer eventually tires of the site, because they feel they have seen it all. Mass personalization or mass customization, discussed more fully below, is an excellent way to keep them interested. If the site can be made to look like their own site, then they may feel more interested in returning. Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and many other sites allow customers to create their own personal look and feel for the site portal. Many sites have adopted Yahoo’s practice of designating this as “myYahoo” or “mySAP.” UCLA even adapted the Yahoo approach by creating a “myUCLA” portal for students. Personalized sites also make it easy to provide recommendations and help to the customer based upon a customer profile and past buying patterns. Amazon’s provision of customized recommendations of books in related areas is an excellent example of customization.
Since so much of what customers do on the Internet is searching, the inclusion of a good search engine is becoming de rigueur. Competition is heating up between engines on who is faster, who is more complete, who provides fewer paid ads, who groups results most usefully, and ultimately who provides the most appropriate results to the customer. There is another tradeoff that needs to be made between using the search engine to provide references to those things that you want the customer to see and angering the customer by providing too many self serving results.
Another way to keep the customer interested is to provide some kind of service on the site. An automobile site might provide a calculator that will allow the user to calculate payments on particular car, or a mortgage or real estate company providing mortgage payment calculations on various homes.
Close the sale. Customers who abandon the purchase prior to closing the sale plague ECommerce sites. This is the most frustrating thing for businesses because you have an interested, self-qualified customer who has taken the time to fill his or her shopping basket, but you failed to close the sale. This can happen for several reasons. Among the most likely:
Leave them wanting to come back for more. The cost of acquiring any customer makes single transactions far less profitable (or even more unprofitable) than return transactions. Once you have spent the money to acquire a customer, you have got to bring them back again and again. This requires a satisfactory experience from start to finish. It demands that you figure out all of the steps above. It also requires that the goods be delivered promptly and correctly and that provisions are made for easy returns and exchanges. Increasingly, customers are demanding, and expecting, more and better customer service on eCommerce sites.[6]
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com sums up mass customization as “If you have 20 million customers, you should have 20 million stores.[7]” His prescription for creating the right kind of customer experience is three fold:
1. Listen to Customers
2. Invent on behalf of customers because it is not their job to invent on behalf of themselves.
3. Personalize. Put each customer at the center of his or her own universe.
Until recently, mass customization was an oxymoron. Today it is a central tenet of the information economy. Companies like Dell Computer have grown to be the world’s largest supplier of personal computers by building every computer to order. The young upstart has eclipsed companies that clung to the old model of mass production, channel distribution, and large specialized inventories. Amazon.com elbowed its way into the clubby book business with a brash business model that tied them far more directly and personally with every customer. Amazon.com customers often receive book recommendations based upon their past reading, buying, and browsing patterns. The new economy industries know their customers and treat each one individually. Each business experience is customized to the customer. It is done on a mass production scale. Mass customization is a hallmark of many eBusinesses. How to put that customer at the center of his or her own universe, and how to do that for millions of customers? Those are the key questions for mass customization.
The vast flow of data collected through the consumer’s actions while using the web provides a treasure trove of information about each consumer’s interests, preferences, actions, location, and affiliations. Sites are designed to elicit and store this information. Marketers try to tempt you to provide that information that is not provided by actions, such as zip code, names, telephone numbers, credit card numbers, etc. By cross correlating the many collections of data about each consumer (an easy task for computers!) companies can obtain more information about the consumer than many consumers are comfortable with.
In February of 2000, DoubleClick, acquired Abacus Direct, and was remarkably up-front about its intention to cross correlate databases of personal information collected by Abacus from the off-line world, with databases of web actions acquired by DoubleClick. The Abacus Direct data contained names, addresses, and purchasing information and it has 88 million personal records. The DoubleClick data was taken anonymously but contains information about viewing, web surfing, and buying habits of internet users. By marrying the two databases, DoubleClick could provide profiles of the actual persons tagged with real names and addresses. Privacy advocates were outraged. The resulting firestorm of criticism surprised DoubleClick’s management, who seemed to feel that they were providing a consumer good. Their first actions were defensive and affirming, but as the criticism raged on they altered their behavior to respond to public pressure. They backed off their plan to cross correlate data to some extent and gave the customer an option to “opt out” of the data.
In fact, consumer actions often substantiate DoubleClick’s point of view. Consumers do like the results of one to one marketing in which they see those things that interest them and put them at the center of the web universe. However, when confronted with an explicit description of the process that leads to such mass customization, they recoil in horror at the implications.
That is the paradox of personalization or mass customization. In order for both companies and consumers to gain the benefits of mass customization, consumers must accept an invasion of privacy that can be chilling to many. The privacy-personalization tradeoff is a dynamic system with constantly changing boundaries. There have been many efforts to break the privacy-personalization trade-off, but nothing has yet emerged that brings a level of comfort to the consumer. The most promising approaches allow users to store their personal information with a trusted steward. Amazon.com provides some of this internally for their customers and thereby allows customers to buy without having to fill out lengthy forms for each purchase. Many consumers seem willing to trust Amazon.com to maintain that data and protect their privacy. Microsoft created the Microsoft Passport system to serve the same purpose for a broader array of goods and services. If consumers were willing to provide Microsoft with the personal information, and trusted them to maintain their privacy, they would be able to avoid the need to provide the same information again and again to other companies on the web. Consumers would need to trust Microsoft for this to be successful, but the launch of Passport during a time when Microsoft was under attack for anti-trust violations made this trust more difficult to obtain.
Of course companies view customer information as vital to their marketing efforts. They would love to have it. “It used to be that the most important thing you could make was a product, and you went looking for a customer for that product. In the information age, the most important thing you make is a customer, and then you go looking for products for the customers that you have” suggest Martha Rogers, of the Pepper and Rogers Group.
There are important differences in companies that work in the era of mass production versus mass customization. In mass production, companies forecast product mixes, create the products through mass production, and then market and sell the products they have. In mass customization, companies get to know their customer and then build the products for their customers. Dell was able to curtail supply chain costs and match consumer desires by setting up a system in which they built each computer to customer order. The established players tended toward a mass production model in which they produced computers and then tried to convince customers that they needed the computers they had built. From time to time this led to problems in moving massive inventories of product that did not really have market appeal. This was a huge problem for Compaq in 1999. One of the most interesting examples of this occurred in the early 80’s when IBM concluded that an inexpensive version of the PC could be sold with weak functionality – the famous PC-Junior. The market disagreed and left IBM with the unenviable and expensive task of unloading inventory and closing down production.
In mass production environments, companies use price-cutting and advertising as tools for moving market acceptance. The automobile industry is a case in point. When slow selling models clog dealer inventories, the automakers must announce expensive rebate programs to clear the chain of excess inventory. Automakers have now suggested that they would like to shorten the production process enough to be able to adopt a build to order approach to automobiles. That will be an ambitious undertaking, but the rewards would be huge.
Mass customization can lead to savings in the upstream supply chain as well as the downstream. If a company can know instantly what the buyers want and communicate that information up stream, then the factories know what to produce and the suppliers know what to deliver and, in turn, produce for the manufacturers. This allows cost to be wrung both from the inventory process and from the supply chain itself.
There are some products that find a need and a community without a structured marketing campaign and then spread through out that community to serve the need. The product is spread by word of mouth or by passing on a copy or a URL to friends and colleagues. Viral marketing is powerful force when it works, but the circumstances under which it works are not yet well understood.
The spread of PK-Zip is an excellent example of viral marketing. The pain that PK-Zip relieved was the pain of exchanging or backing up large files. PK-Zip was created as a shareware program that would let a large file be compressed efficiently to a much smaller size. This greatly facilitated the exchange of large data and program files. Knowledgeable early adopters began to use PK-Zip to compress and exchange files. The program was available as a share-ware program which could be downloaded for free. If the user then found the program useful, they were encouraged to pay for that program by sending the money to PK-Ware. The program spread rapidly since every time someone sent “Zipped” data to someone else, the receiver had to become a user of PK-Zip as well. The constant exposure, the free download, and the useful functionality all combined to make PK-Zip the absolute market dominator of the compression tools. Once again, the forces of “winner take all” economics made competing with PK-Zip a nearly futile task.
Many of the products that came to dominate their niches in eBusiness did so through some aspects of viral marketing. The first Mosaic browser, The Linux Apache Web server, The Unix SendMail application, and the Yahoo search engine, are all examples. Sometimes viral marketing can be encouraged, nurtured, and even protected. The America On-Line instant messaging system (IM) has spread through viral marketing and become a key competitive advantage for AOL. Because AOL has the largest number of network subscribers, it is imperative that any competing IM tool be compatible with AOL IM. Although that is fairly straight forward technically, AOL has gone to great lengths to block Microsoft and other competitors who have tried to allow their subscribers to IM AOL subscribers. In the meantime, the AOL IM tool continues to spread as AOL users send invitations to others to join them in IM. When you can get your own customers to market your products without any compensation at all, then you have achieved true viral marketing.
Use of communities to develop targeting marketing programs is very closely tied to viral marketing. Once a community has developed to a sustainable size, it will often become a kind of marketing arm for the company. Many companies have had “User groups” that act like communities organized around specific products. The “Apple Pi” group in the Washington, DC area is an interesting example of such a nearly self-sustaining community. For years, Apple Pi has devoted it self to the support of a community of Apple enthusiasts.
AOL recognized the value of communities very early on. They recruited and supported “volunteers” who tended the communities, enforced the rules, and assisted in AOL marketing. As the communities grew and AOL evolved its business it became less and less clear whether the “volunteers” were actually underpaid staff. A series of court cases in process in 2001 will likely lead to an official determination of the status of the “volunteers.” The one thing that no one argues about is that the “volunteers” were and are critically important to AOL’s success.
Community development is closely related to Metcalf’s Law in which the value of a network of n persons is equal to the square of the number of persons (n^2). Reed has pointed out that Metcalf’s law really relates to one-to-one interactions among n persons. He has proposed “Reed’s Law” as an alternative.[8] If one calculates the number of communities that can be formed from n persons, then it turns out that this is proportional to n! (n factorial- or n x n-1 x n-2 x n-3….1). This is an even more powerful scaling factor than Metcalf’s law. Community development has been a very important part of Internet marketing.
Guerrilla’s are known as partisan fighters who use primitive tools and weapons and a superior knowledge of the landscape to fight a war against a foe who is vastly better equipped and resourced. Guerrilla marketing is then an effort to use low cost primitive means of reaching customers rather than to use the slick high budget glossy print ads or expensive television advertising.
In some cases guerrilla marketing campaigns make an effort to ignite viral marketing. In 2000, Lee Apparel, launched a guerrilla marketing campaign for its fading Lee Dungarees brand by emailing the URL’s of three fake websites to 200,000 names on a marketing list. The URL’s (www.rubberburner.com, www.supergreg.com, and www.borntodestroy.com) introduced the visitor to three questionable characters that were later revealed to be villains to be vanquished by the “Buddy Lee” kewpie doll, a long forgotten symbol of Lee Dungarees that dated back to the 1920’s. Amazingly, there was no mention of the Lee brand on any of the villain’s sites. This was a clear effort to induce the viewers to email the URL’s to curious friends and thereby virally spread the awareness of the villains that were later to be vanquished in a $10 million radio, television, web, and poster campaign.
Success in eCommerce depends upon first mover advantage, obtaining customer lockin, and network externalities. Barriers to entry by competitors are low. Brand recognition is important. These have combined to create a sense of desperation for new dot-com companies as they enter markets crowed with competitors. This has also generated a surge in print, billboard, and media advertising to establish brand awareness. Rather than harm traditional advertising outlets, eBusiness has generated a flood of new advertising revenues! Desperation marketing may have reached its nadir at the end of 1999, when WebEx (An on-line meeting hosting service) hired RuPaul, a 6’7” female impersonator to try to attract attention to their company and products.[9] They called the advertising campaign the “Meetings are such a drag” campaign
Another desperation marketing play was giving something away for free. There were too many variations on this theme to count! In 1998, IdeaLab, a California eBusiness Incubator launched Free-PC, which intended to give away 25,000 free PC’s to targeted consumers who would then agree to be peppered with ads while using the net. Free-PC did receive ample free coverage in the media because of the audaciousness of the approach. The plan may have been wonderful marketing, but apparently the economics was not as well thought out as the marketing. Free-PC was quietly folded into eMachines in early 2000 after losing millions on a highly visible experimental business model.
During the 2000 Super Bowl, over a dozen Internet start-ups each spent single digit millions on 3o second ads. Many of these start-ups had no revenues and were barely in business. The ill formed plan behind this spending was to create hype and “buzz” about their sites that would cause consumers to visit immediately, find the great stuff that was there and then come back again and again by generating revenues through on-line purchases. According to Nielsen/Net Ratings, the first assumption was at least partially true: the ads did generate first time visitors; the second assumption that customers would return did not pan out at all.[10] A survey by D’Arcy, Masius, Benton, and Bowles (St. Louis) revealed that only 17 % of viewers could recall any of the ads.
Desperation marketing was so focused on creating the buzz that it often neglected to mention the basics, like what the company does for example. One forgettable ad from Cyberian Outpost (www.outpost.com ) showed Gerbils being shot from a cannon. It did not, however, make it easy for viewers to discover what Cyberian did, which was on-line computer sales. The questionable taste displayed in ads like this could generate as much negative buzz as positive. Beyond.com’s “Naked Man” ads (www.beyond.com ) were another example of advertising that may have been amusing to some, but was quite negative to others. The quest for recognition through exquisitely bad taste continued as ecampus.com had a young man recite the alphabet in belches, Alloy On-line (www.alloy.com ) showed a girl accidentally eating bird droppings, and quixi (www.quixi.com ) invited readers to consider saving time by using their personal shopper/valet/assistant services by showing a man eating a formal dinner while seated on a toilet with his pants around his ankles while asking “what have you done to save time lately. While the Cliff Freeman and Partners Ad agency that created both the gerbil and toilet ads thinks that the “edginess” is just the ticket to engage the viewer, most of the other agencies questioned the wisdom of associating ones brand with these unsavory images. Ann Hayden, managing partner of Young and Rubicam observes that “They don’t seem to understand that ads do more – they present the kind of company you are to others.”[11]
Perhaps the rationale behind this kind of advertising was the old adage “there is no such thing as bad publicity.” Unfortunately, some dot-com advertising has proven that this adage is not always true! The dot-com advertising experiences of 1999 and 2000 have also demonstrated, once again, that branding is very important, is hard to do, and takes quite a bit of time and effort. There are no shortcuts to branding.
In the battle between “bricks” and “clicks,” branding would be an important advantage that “bricks” often had over “clicks.” It was one more piece of evidence that it could be easier for “bricks” to become clicks that it would for clicks to emulate the bricks. Brand-names like Wal-Mart (Wal-Mart.com) and K-Mart (Blue Light.com) already meant something to consumers. Names like Amazon.com were quickly becoming known to consumers and could be expanded into related areas. It was another situation entirely for the many “YetAnother.com’s” who had to compete in a shrill market for consumer attention, and many felt that desperation marketing was the best way to break through the noise.
[2] “Price Smarter on the Net;” W. Baker, M. Marn, and C. Zawada; Harvard Business Review; p 122-127; Feb. 2000.
[3] “American consumers will force e-tailers to just say no to dynamic pricing.” InfoWorld; Friday, Oct. 6, 2000
[4] “A Fool's Paradise;”;” Philipp Harper, Forbes ASAP, Feb. 19, 2001.
[6] “Are Customers Kings?;” Information Week; December 11, 2000.
[7] “The New WWWorld of Retail;” by S. Rupley; PC Magazine p iBiz 7; August 2000.
[8] “The Law of the Pack ;” David P. Reed; Harvard Business Review; Feb. 2001.
[9] “WebEx drags RuPaul into the Web;” Red Herring; Dec. 11, 1999.
[10] “Top New Economy Lies;” by Jane Weaver; Smart Business for the New Economy p 102; August 2000.
[11] “Bathroom (Give Me a) Break;” Business 2.0; Jan. 23, 2001. (www.business2.com )