Product Reviews

There's no shortage of guides to marketing your way around the Net. Ever since the original spammers, Canter and Siegel, published How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway back in 1995 there's been a procession of titles following the same vein. Some have been nothing more than get-rich-quick guides updated for the Internet age, and most have missed the point entirely. And sadly, the Guide to One-to-One Web Marketing does little to progress the genre further.

It claims to be a revolutionary new strategy for building customer loyalty and generating repeat sales on the Web. The guide, you're told, will arm you with all the knowledge and skills needed to develop your own winning one-to-one Web marketing strategy. But for a book that purports to advise on the best technology for building a relationship with your customers, there are too many suggestions that made me splutter with shock. Before I even reached page one, in the introduction I found the immortal words: 'Push is considered one of the Internet's killer apps.'

You can tell almost exactly which month of which year the book was written from this one remark. On the following page is the equally astounding suggestion that: 'On-line advertising has moved from simple Web banners to full-motion video.'

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Again, such a lack of understanding of the medium so early on is rather disconcerting. And it gets even better. Also, I found 'on-line advertising has become acceptable to most on-line users' tucked away on p224.

There are other problems, though, that relate specifically to the UK market, such as the book's overpowering American essence. US marketing techniques aren't totally relevant to the UK market, even when we talk about a supposedly global medium like the Web. With geek-speak such as 'intermercial' and 'customerization' dotted around the pages, it's easy to see where this book is heading. If one-to-one actually means American-to-American, then what am I doing reading this guide and, more importantly, why should you even consider buying it?

Ultimately, this book appears to be aimed at the Internet virgin, what with its advice against using the blink tag or spinning logos just for the sake of it, although I imagine that it would prove too confusing even for the novice. The chapter on 'one-to-one email' warns about the dangers of spam yet continues with tips such as: 'You have to make the messages interesting and informative, not just sales pitches. You can't send them too often (once a week is too often, every two to three weeks is probably about right).'

With the help of the technologies available to the Web retailer it is quite possible to forge multiple one-to-one relationships with customers without too much difficulty. After all, it's exactly the kind of thing that computers excel at: tracking customer movements, delivering product information based on previous trends, and so on. However, I fail to see any real benefit in buying this book over visiting a few of the more successful on-line shops and seeing how they do it for real. In all fairness, there are some interesting snippets, but they're drowned out by a sea of nonsense.