Cyberbranding: Brand Building in the Digital Economy

Foreword

It has become fashionable in recent months to beat up on the Internet evangelists who told us how brands like eToys.com and Furniture.com were going to make the world forget about Toys “” Us and Ethan Allen. The notion that young, aggressive entrepreneurs were going to change the rules of business and steal the bread off the tables of traditional companies was too good a story to ignore. Netscape’s Marc Andreessen and Yahoo’s Jerry Yang and David Filo were poster children for the new era. Stock options promised to turn even low-level programmers into millionaires.

During my four years as an editor of Internet World magazine, our publication ...