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Marketing is changing. In a time of data abundance, incredible technology, imaginative canvases, and serious cultural and social conflicts, marketers, suppliers and agencies face increasing complexity and competition. While the industry is ripe with different âthought leadershipâ conversations about âwhatâs nextâ offering simple magic solutions, the one consistent thing is that sooner or later someone will mention Amazon.
Since its incorporation in 1994 and via a close escape from being called âCadabraâ, Amazon.com Inc, the US-based retail giant, has grown to become the worldâs largest internet retailer despite an explosion of competition. It is only the second company to exceed a market capitalisation of $1 trillion in intra-day trading. Indeed Amazonâs scale now seems to be its only threat.
As Amazon adds new categories and new businesses, it has rapidly become both the enemy at the gates and the new hope for doing business.
But what is Amazon?
At Digitas we have been having many conversations and working sessions with clients and colleagues that touch upon Amazon and its impact upon marketing. What is fascinating is that whether you are an Amazon expert, a customer, a Marketplace seller or even a media insider, everyone has a different perspective. Amazon is so vast, with so many subsidiaries, brands, verticals and products that you are rapidly reminded of the infamous âblind men and the elephantâ parable.
In the marketing industry there is often a tendency to project partial knowledge as whole truth, and perhaps only God or Jeff Bezos can truly know Amazon, but based on conversations, many articles in the trade and mainstream press, detailed reports and even some (public) internal Amazon material, we sort to lay down a primer, the basic starter knowledge if you will, of how Amazon is changing marketing.
The world needs less PowerPoint.
Instead of writing another report or slide deck we combined research and sources into a Concept Map similar to our previous Map of Modern Brand Building. Only a little bit bigger.
âWith a concept map, a viewer can see both the forest and individual trees. The big picture is clear because all the ideas are presented on one surface. At the same time, itâs easy to dive in and see details and how they relate.â
Four nodes began to appear in the map.
- What is Amazon, its pillars and how it creates value across the globe.
- The increasing competitive impact for marketers in CPG, Auto, Fashion, IoT, Electronics, Home Services and Entertainment (both from Amazon and from 3rd Parties on Marketplace including those causing âthe China Crisisâ).
- The 5 Convenience Principles behind how Amazon is affecting and transforming the Customer Journey in terms of customer expectations.
- The growing Amazon Advertising and Media services that brands and sellers can make use of to build their brands and reach new audiences.
This âMap of Amazon and its impact on Modern Marketingâ does not claim to be exhaustive and only covers one and half of Amazonâs three primary pillars (Prime, Webservices, Marketplace). It does not go deep into AWS, healthcare, AI or Finance.
And yet it reveals two competitive forces that Amazonâs customer obsession has unleashed to transform the marketing value chain: Experiential Competition and Perceptual Competition.
Despite Amazonâs disruptive ways to distribute products and change customer relationships, itâs the âreal worldâ activations that often make its competitors most worried
Experiential Competition is about new, practical ways of selling. This type of competition promotes customer experiences that replace others or reposition them within the customer journey. It is about offering accessibility, simplicity, service convenience, personalisation, purchase convenience, and channel flexibility to improve sales activation, fulfilment, useage and repeat purchase. It is not just about âtime well savedâ but expectations met or exceeded.
New, newsworthy ways to access the Amazon ecosystem open unexpected ways to cross promote products and gather data to improve the experience
As Benedict Evans observed, new customer journeys lead to new kinds of decisions that change what gets bought and then further change how it is sold. Experiential Competition is driving these changes.
This can lead to Amazon famously selling more private-label batteries than Duracell or 55% of US consumers starting online product searches on Amazon rather than Google. And it can lead to infamously rigid industries like Automotive being forced to reimagine the purchase experience more around people than dealers when Hyundai opens a virtual showroom in Amazon Vehicles.
While there are many âmagic bulletâ tips and tactics out there promising marketers short cuts to delivering great experiences, too few channel the Amazon Experiential Competition lesson of âsell something the customer wants to buy, at a price the customer wants to pay, with the service the customer expectsâ.
In the meantime Amazon, in a repeat of its famous externalisation strategy, is offering marketers and agencies a new toolkit and APIs to drive these experiential customer journeysâââon and off platform. It is poacher, gamekeeper and the person selling the bullets.
But if you solve a customer problem with technology and tactics alone youâll own that solution until someone improves the technology. If you solve the problem with a brand story it is untouchable. This is where Amazon is most dangerous. This is the power of Prime and Perceptual Competition.
The Power of Prime: Amazonâs most important product is not a product but a membership thatâs grown from shipping and offers to events and innovations
Perceptual Competition changes customer expectations. It means you set the bar regardless of whether your product or service competes in the category in question. Building on great customer experience it creates a meaningful and distinctive brand with cultural relevance, esteem and saliency. Occasionally it can involve the odd Super Bowl ad. The result is greater mental availability for your brand, driven by broad reach, emotions and associationsâââeffectiveness not just efficiency.
Amazonâs position as a dominant Perceptual Competitor is reflected in its $1,000,000,000,000 market value and a brand value of $207.6 billion. It is a result of selling not just low priced products with excellent customer service, but âthe thing it has always sold the mostâââto investors, customers, the mediaâââexcitement.â Perceptual Competition means competing on brand experience rather than CX, and Touchpoints ROI Tracker studies show that this is increasingly a better indicator of market share success than spend or share of voice.
Making shopping frictionless: Innovative ways to gain attention, scare the competition and position them as inferior and old fashioned
The key proposition that enables Amazon to bring its brand, many products, experiments and channels together is Amazon Prime. Bezos said âwe want Prime to be such a good value, youâd be irresponsible not to be a memberâ, but it is more than good valueâââit is a brand experience flywheel.
Primeâs ability to funnel new ideas to loyal customers drives growth and innovation. Amazonâs first forays into scalable grocery delivery via AmazonFresh and AmazonPantry were only available to Prime members as was its hyperlocal 1â2 hr delivery service Prime Now. Primeâs flywheel unites personalised, efficient discovery with rewards, these generate momentum with more shoppers (and sellers) which helps reduce prices while cross subsidising content, that then further builds traffic, which increases discovery and improves the rewards etcâŠ
Perceptions of trust enable Amazon to develop a growing range of own brands, with services to help customers enjoy them and new ways to pay for them. It helps them succeed and helps Amazon move on if they donât.
By combining an aura of innovation and novelty with a simple subscription Amazon can generate more customer, investor and media excitement than a Costco membership.
Building on the trust created by the value and convenience of Amazonâs core shopping services with compelling digital content from Prime Video, Amazon Studios, Music Unlimited, Twitch or Audible then provides a competitive moat for the Amazon business, increasing ecosystem reach and audience lock in.
âAmazon Studios is making original content for Prime VideoâŠfrom a business point of view for us, we get to monetize this content in an unusual way. Winning a Golden Globe helps us sell more shoes and it does that in a very direct wayâŠ. Weâve monitored that Prime Video customers renew [Prime] at higher rates, and they convert from free trials at higher rates.âEntertainment moves Amazon out of âjustâ the shopping journey, increases lock-in and offers opportunities to improve the customer experience with data insight
The continuing quest to increase the power of Prime led to what for many CPG and retail businesses was the tipping point of âAmazon Anxietyâ: the $13.7bn takeover of Whole Foods, the multichannel grocery retailer with over 470 stores. Structural change happens in a category when >20% goes online. Even Amazon donât believe this will happen in grocery, but instead phsyical retail can have a structural impact on digital propositions. The Whole Foods takeover offers Prime members better prices, more omnichannel opportunities to buy and pick-up, a stronger health assortment and a last mile delivery boost. It also offers non-Prime customers a very prominent real-world demonstration of what they are missing.
Already Amazon has cut prices on high volume stables by up to 43%, installed Amazon lockers and introduced Prime savings and in-store benefits. However, while a new efficiency-first ideology has increased sales it has also caused a âculture clashâ, with greater centralisation and lay-offs.
The âdestroyer of physical retailâ is a bigger name in bricks-and-mortar than Sears and JCPenny with new opportunities to increase the value of Prime and reward members
Ultimately the forces of experiential and perceptual competition that Amazon has unleashed on marketing and its value chain have helped create an âexpectation economyâ that brands and businesses must navigate to survive.
We may need a bigger (boat)Â map.
If youâd like to explore Amazon, the changing marketing value chain and how customer journeys are evolving further, or join one of our upcoming workshop sessions, or even if youâd like the wall-sized version of the map, then contact us: amazonmap@digitas.com
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Sources: CB Insights, Datamonitor, Amazon Shareholder Letters, Amazon Media Group, Bloomberg, CNN, Digiday, Feedvisor, Mintel, The Drum, BCG, Publicis Media, Warc, Global Web Index, New York Times, Techcrunch, AdweekâŠand others.
A Map of Amazon and Modern Marketing was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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