It takes a great deal of effort to write any book, even a bad one, so I hate to be excessively critical, but I found very little value in this book. Despite its intriguing title, I don't think anyone will gain from reading this book, unless they are a prospective client of the authors' consulting firm, Beyond Philosophy, and would like a peek at the vendor's approach. (There's no escaping the shadow of the authors' consultancy within these pages. I know consultants write books to get noticed, but this one is more like something you would create just so you could hand it out to clients.)

At its best, this book repeats marketing dogma. More often, though, it simply misses. You can usually count on a book like this for some valuable anecdotes, if nothing else, but even the authors' anecdotes don't always make the intended point (as near as I could tell). It really needs a substantial reorganization, starting with a framework that would help the authors decide what is important and what is trivial, and then a solid edit.

In my opinion, this book is probably not what you're looking for. For example, you'd think that a book about "Building Great Customer Experience" would at least define "customer experience." But no--the authors say that people are usually better off figuring this out for themselves. You'll be much happier, for example, with Lasalle and Britton's (2003) Priceless: Turning Ordinary products into Extraordinary Experiences.

Mohr's text is a good overview of industry practice, mixed with theory on marketing and the diffusion of innovations. This text is a huge step forward for the discipline. As I see the field of electronic marketing evolving, I think we will see material about the Internet moving into mainstream marketing courses. What will remain in the specialized electronic marketing course is the intersection of marketing with the cutting edge of technology. Mohr's text makes me feel much better prepared for this evolution.

I really like Kurt Thearling's writing, in general--he has written some very clear and practical papers on data mining. But I was badly disappointed by this book. I should have guessed from the complex title that the book is merely an attempt to cash in on the current interest in "customer relationship management" or CRM. In my opinion, CRM is not about data mining--see Dick Lee's book, The Customer Relationship Management Survival Guide, for a much more substantial treatment of CRM. In trying to be a book about CRM, this volume also does a poor job explaining data mining techniques--I strongly recommend Linoff and Berry's second book, Mastering Data Mining, instead. In short, I don't think that this is the book you want, no matter what you might be looking for.

I have adopted Brondmo's email marketing book as a text in my electronic marketing course. I recommend it as essential reading. The book takes over where Seth Godin's Permission Marketing left off. Godin's book was all about philosophy, with not too much about implementation. Brondmo's book start with a grounding in a customer-centered / one-to-one business philosophy but carries through implementation to program review, getting down to nuts and bolts. His examples and analogies ring true... .

Essentially everything that marketers do over the Internet, from the ASP to the online retailer, is a service. Services marketers face unique challenges. Today's electronic marketer will find useful lessons in the services marketing literature. You will find either Valarie Zeithaml or Mary Jo Bitner in the byline of almost every important piece of research on services marketing published in the 1990s. Together, they have produced a textbook that is very much worthy of their reputations.

This book is fairly comprehensive, although it does not include Bitner's most recent work on consumer response to self-service technologies. Still, as an electronic marketer reads through this book, they cannot help but find themselves asking new questions about their business and how they can make it better. The book is a relatively easy read, and it is not overly academic--the theories and frameworks presented are simply tools that lead to practical solutions to real problems. There are many examples in the text; often, the company is familiar but the business practices described here are not so well known.

I strongly recommend this book to e-marketers.

I really like Dick Lee's book. As an instructor teaching an "electronic marketing" class, I wanted to find a place for CRM, but I was having trouble myself getting a handle on what CRM is. The author's perspective--that CRM is about organizational transformation--rings true for me. It's not database marketing, and it's not an adjunct to ERP. It's the process of creating a customer-centric organization, with the transformation facilitated by technology. This book offers both high-level and on-the-ground perspectives on the process, all based on the author's extensive consulting experience. The book's earthy vernacular put me off, at first, but I could not put the book down. It really is the book I was looking for.

As a text, this is about the only game in town. And it certainly shows a lot of work in assembling sources and so forth. Especially if you are coming at this filed from scratch, this book is a decent place to start. But you may find yourself longing for deeper insight--less mere summarization of other sources and more maturation. And the support materials seem to be rather thin. But remember, Ward got his book written, and that, in itself, says a lot.

If you are trying to assemble a comprehensive view of electronic marketing, this book contains critical pieces. Other than Moore's Law, few recent predictions have actually foretold events in this field. Alongside books about the possibilities of e-marketing--exploiting our ability to collect, sort and distribute information--this book highlights the limits of pure information, and points to contrary social forces. Especially for people with a layman's background in technology, I think this book is a must-read.

First off, this book really needs a good edit. I suspect that its publication schedule did not allow time for sufficient proofreading. Second, the book contains nice anecdotes of various companies' adventures in e-commerce, and anecdotes are certainly useful, although the anecdotes don't always seem to support the points that the author is trying to make. In any event, too much of this book is regurgitated from the trade press, without any value-added contribution from the author. The author may spend 2 or 3 pages "summarizing" an article from the trade press, which was only 2 or 3 pages long to begin with. This book is not nearly as good as one might wish, but it is "consistent with reality," which is more than you can say for some e-commerce books.

This book stands out from the clutter of e-business texts. It does one of the better jobs of elucidating the basic principles that show up in most books. The book is not in love with technology--it keeps the emphasis squarely on the customer. It gives you a set of things to think about, regarding your own business. It might not serve well as a textbook, but it does provide good source material for a course on e-marketing.