Digital Brand Romance

PART I

Webonomics, or the Forces That DetermineHow We Buy

In 1996, Schwartz, a technology writer and former editor of Business-Week, coined the term Webonomics: “the study of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods, services, and ideas over the World Wide Web” (Schwartz 1997). Back then, the Internet was “astonishingly inhabited by tens of millions” of users around the world, and we used charming phrases like “World Wide Web” when talking about the new revolution slowly emerging around us. From his prescient vantage point at the beginning of the Internet, Schwartz foretold nine principles that would be critical to business success in the new economic arena. Of the tenets he defined, his recognition that the resource of scarcity ...