Industrial Marketing Management 38 (2009) 846
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Industrial Marketing Management
Book review
eMarketing eXcellence—Planning and optimizing your digital
marketing, Dave Chaffey, Paul R. Smith (Eds.), 2008, Butter-
worth-Heinemann, Oxford, England, 508 pages, ISBN 978-
0750689458
Chaffey and Smith's new book eMarketing eXcellence—Planning
and Optimizing Your Digital Marketing, provides an excellent guide
for both marketing and business professionals who involved in digital
and e-Marketing and those who are beginning on this contemporary
e-Business area. “eMarketing eXcellence successfully combines
breadth of subject mater with a depth that gives the reader more
than a superficial understanding of the issues. Smith and Chaffey have
also broken down the subject into the type of granular level that
should allow busy marketing managers to find exactly what they need
in the few moments that they have in the working environment,” says
Danny Meadows-Klue, president of Interactive Advertising Bureau
(Europe).
This book serves very well as an introduction and a text for
undergraduates and graduate students who are new to the area of e-
Marketing and as an in-depth guide towards marketing and business
practitioners who are responsible for creating and implementing
effective, customer-centric e-Marketing plans in an e-Business
environment. This book contributes to our understanding of e-
Marketing by summarizing the major contemporary concepts,
models, and theories of e-Marketing and illustrating applications
with real-life examples and cases.
Topics covered within the book's ten chapters include: defining e-
Marketing and describing the difference between e-Commerce, e-
Business and e-Marketing, evaluating organization's marketing mix,
assessing different E-models, researching online customer's mind,
exploiting new technological tools, how to design commercially-led
sites, how to build traffic, developing integrated online customer
relationship, setting up and managing e-Business, how to create a
comprehensive e-Marketing plan.
Chaffey and Smith clearly describe the difference between e-
Commerce, e-Business, and e-Marketing. This is a topic often neglected
in e-Marketing texts. Without a clear understanding of these concepts,
effective strategy and efficient implementation are impossible.
One of the most appealing aspects of the book is to show the reader
how to create comprehensive e-Marketing plans based on the SOSTAC
Planning System, which has been used by thousands of organizations
around the world. SOSTAC stands for: Situation analysis, Objectives,
Strategy, Tactics, Actions and Control. For example, Chapter 9 provides
a step-by-step guideline for developing effective e-Marketing plans. It
is a must read for marketing and business professionals who are
doi:10.1016/j.indmarman.2009.08.001
integrating e-Marketing into their existing marketing strategy and
those who are seeking to optimize their e-Marketing plans. In
addition, the importance of fully integrating e-Marketing plan with
the marketing objectives and the corporate aims of moving towards e-
Business as a whole is emphasized throughout the text.
Another highlight of this text is the extensive coverage of
emerging E-models and their potential use in the e-Business
environment. The business world is changing dramatically and e-
Marketing has an impact on all aspects of marketing from marketing
strategy, marketing communications, and consumer behavior to
marketing research. Therefore, it is important to revise existing
models and to create new models fitting in with new e-Business
environment. The authors provide an excellent summary of the
changes to existing models and explore the emerging models enabled
by technology and the opportunities presented by these new models.
The third notable feature of this book is the emphasis on the
implementation of these e-Marketing plans, e-Marketing strategies,
e-Marketing models, and e-Marketing theories. The authors provide
numerous best practice checklists, e-Marketing Excellence boxes
(real-world examples of best practice approaches), and e-Marketing
Insights boxes (quotes, opinions and frameworks from industry
practitioners and academics) to help the reader better understand the
e-Marketing implementation process. In addition, a variety of success
stories from leading adopters of e-Marketing such as Alliance and
Leicester, BMW, Dell, CIPD, Diageo, E-consultancy, INGDirect, Tek-
tronix and TUI, are provided to supplement the text.
In summary, this well-written, comprehensive text is useful to
both students and towards marketing and business practitioners of e-
Marketing. The authors provide a comprehensive and contemporary
overview of e-Marketing through a clear structure based on sections
with clear learning outcomes, chapter summaries and self-test
questions. In addition, the book has extensive coverage on the latest
trends in e-Marketing — affiliate marketing, search engine marketing,
social networking, viral marketing, and Email marketing. Overall,
the authors do an excellent job in creating both a highly practical
reference book for managers and a comprehensive text for students.
Andy W. Hao
University of Hartford, United States
E-mail address: Hao@Hartford.edu.