Preface to the Special Section on eBranding

Andreas Herrmann ([email protected]) is Professor and Director at the Institute for Media and Communications Management of the University St Gallen. At the MCM, he focuses on the design of media and product management. He has published widely about branding, pricing and marketing research. Eric J. Johnson ([email protected]) is Norman Eig Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, Columbia University and Director of CEBiz, the Columbia Center for Excellence in E-Business (www.cebiz.org). Professor Johnson has a strong research and teaching interest in e-commerce. His other interests include consumer and managerial decision making and brand equity. His articles have appeared in consumer, marketing, management science and organizational behaviour journals. Marketers know what a brand is in the physical world: the sum, in the consumer’s mind, of the personality, presence, and performance of a given product or service. These ‘3 Ps’ are also essential on the World Wide Web. In addition, digital brand builders must manage the consumer’s online experience of the product, from first encounter through purchase to delivery and beyond. Digital brand builders should care about the consumer’s online experiences for the simple reason that all of them – good, bad or indifferent – influence consumer perceptions of a product’s brand. To put it differently, on the Web, the experience is the brand. Yet many marketers, particularly those whose experience is limited to the offline world, lack a coherent framework and concrete methods for achieving the broader objectives of online brand building. These marketers need an approach for aligning the promises they make to consumers, the Web design necessary to deliver those promises online, and the economic model required to turn a profit. These three elements – the promise, the design and the economic model – together form the inseparable components of a successful Internet business, or what might be called a digital brand. Creating winning digital brands requires managers to reconsider how they view both the Internet and branding. Offline brands have long thrived by delivering narrow solutions to limited customer needs. Online, however, customers have learned to expect that the companies they patronize will meet a much fuller spectrum of their needs and desires. To succeed online, those companies will have to create full-fledged Internet businesses, or digital brands, that can fulfil this expectation. The special focus theme on e-branding in this issue is started off with an analysis of the role trust and reputation play in online retail. Sabine Einwiller, in her article ‘When Reputation Engenders Trust: An Empirical Investigation in Businessto-Consumer Electronic Commerce’, aims to develop a comprehensive concept and measure of trust in business to consumer commerce. This includes a concep-tualization and method of measuring both Internet vendor and system reputation, since reputation of both types is deemed as antecedent to trust. Her ultimate aim in the paper is to test the interrelationship of both vendor and system reputation and trust dimensions within the context of B2C e-commerce. The results of her empirical study support the validity of a differentiated conceptualization of trust. The second paper in this section, ‘The Impact of Visiting a Brand Website on Brand Personality’ by Brigitte Müller and Jean-Louis Chandon, investigates how the DO I: 10 .1 08 0/ 10 19 67 80 32 00 01 08 29 3