Amazon’s Brilliant Marketing

Amazon echo dotA little while back I bought an Amazon Echo Dot. For some reason, I haven’t really taken the time to learn what it can do yet. Sure I can ask it the weather and to play a song, but not much more. This is not for lack of Amazon trying to motivate me, though. I get emails every few days suggesting I teach Alexa some new skills. If I would just open the Alexa app on my iPhone, surely I would find happiness there.

Nobody does marketing better than Amazon. This week on Cyber Monday, Amazon sent out an email specifically for Echo owners. The deal was pretty cool. If you used your Amazon Echo to order one of the things on their list using your voice, you’d get 25% off the purchase price and a $10 Amazon gift card.
This was too good to pass up. I went to the kitchen where I have the Echo Dot, and called out her name. The little blue / turquoise ring floated around the top to let me know she was listening. I said, “Order a Fire Stick.” She said, “it’s not in stock right now, but will ship on Thursday. The price will be $29.99 plus tax. Do you want to order it?” I said, “yes”.

It was the most frictionless purchase l’ve ever made. Now think about what Amazon accomplished here:

  • They got me to buy something
  • They taught me how to use what I’d already bought to buy more things
  • The thing they got me to buy was a device to help me buy and rent video content from them
  • They gave me a gift card… so I could buy more things from them
  • And they taught me to like it

4 thoughts on “Amazon’s Brilliant Marketing

  1. George - December 1, 2016

    That’s all true.

    But had a similar conversation with Len Edgerly who produces the “Kindle Chronicles” podcast and blog. He was excited about the WiFi “Dash” tags and ability to order from his “Alexa,” which he ordered pre-release.

    Turns out part of Amazon’s successful marketing is to take customer minds off price. Where it is possible to price shop on Amazon’s site, “auto ordering” through an Amazon device will get whatever price Amazon chooses for you. And it may not (always) as Len discovered when, as I recall the episode, his first “oral” order didn’t go through for some reason, and he ended up on Amazon’s website where (been a while) he ended up with a better “deal.”

    Just sayin’

  2. Allison Sheridan - December 1, 2016

    Interesting point, George. Yesterday I wanted to buy a Kindle. I knew that the “with offers” ad-based Paperwhite version was $119. But when I tried to order via Alexa, she simply refused to give me that price. She insisted that I wanted the one without ads for I think $20 more. Oddly now that I’m trying to quote the exact price, I can’t find the non-ad version on Amazon’s site.

    So yeah, what George said!

  3. Emma - November 26, 2022

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  4. Polly - December 23, 2022

    Marketing in this case wins back a really colossal value. But no less important is the quality of your product and the resource on which you promote it. Keep in mind that the e-commerce market is very competitive and you have to work hard to be successful. Luckily, here you can always find eCommerce software development company for that.

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