We-Commerce
How to Create, Collaborate, and Succeed in the Sharing Economy
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Named an Inc. Business Beach Read for Summer 2016!
In WE-Commerce, visionary marketing strategist Billee Howard lays out her plan for a new vision of success and long-term, purposeful profitability in the new global, sharing economy
Today, the most successful businesses and entrepreneurs thrive through connectivity, socialization, and sharing. It is an age of WE-Commerce, an economy centered on the power of “we” instead of “me,” focused on the needs of the many over the few. Booming companies such as Uber and Airbnb leverage technology to create platforms that rely largely on social media and community feedback to facilitate people’s ability to collaborate with one another. Instead of traditional business strategies, companies must now inspire belief and trust in their communities; collaborate with their customers; create business models that are socially and environmentally responsible; find opportunities for creative collaboration with large, global markets; and become a new generation of innovators—“artists of business.”
With advice from “stay small but include all” to “profit with purpose” and “embrace disruption,” Billee Howard gives readers the reinvented business toolkit that they will need to effectively collaborate, co-create, and succeed in a WE-Commerce landscape, and to acquire a new set of skills that will position them as leaders in the transformed economy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Howard, founder of the communications firm Brandthropologie, devotes this slim but hard-going business manual to the argument that the business world, transformed by the 2008 crash, now requires a more social, personal approach to branding and product development one harking back to humanity's "small-community origins." She aims to show how to succeed in this quickly shifting marketplace and become "a true artist of business" able to "introduce creativity into everything your brand produces." The book introduces the "new Golden Rules of Branding," such as "create a brand culture that encourages trust and sharing" and "recognize that failure is the new success," backed up by a few case studies. Howard discusses the power of cult brands, the advantages for companies that convey a sense of social purpose, and the trick to "staying small" while still reaching and satisfying customers. These are all fair enough points, but the buzzword-filled presentation (e.g., "adapt to the laws of creative evolution") and self-satisfied tone ("I can... help you understand the new laws of the jungle") will make this a tough read for most.
