Amazon is an American multinational company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, US. It provides an array of services that span from the online retail, AI assistant provider, cloud computing service provider, live-streaming services, music, and video streaming, game streaming, and also web services among almost an uncountable industries and services, it has managed to enter into. Hence, it has been rightly referred to as “one of the most influential economic and cultural forces in the world.”
Amazon is considered the face of what corporate success looks like. It is currently the world’s most valuable company and considered one of the big four technology companies along with Google, Apple, and Facebook. The company has built a customer service, inventory, and shipping empire that is unparalleled and allows the company to complete the order right from ordering to shipping.
It’s web service arm – Amazon Web Services – is a multi-billion dollars arm of the company that provides cloud hosting services to millions of businesses around the world, including government agencies and universities.
The digital media and consumer electronics arm of Amazon – the producers and innovators of products like Kindle e-book reader, Kindle Fire tablet, and not-to-forget, AI bot Alexa – is one of the fastest-growing revenue stream for the company, today.
History
Amazon was piloted in a garage by Jeff Bezos in the year 1994-95. The company was formerly known as “Cadaver” and was a platform for selling online books. Jeff changed the name of his company when a lawyer misheard his company’s name and stated it to be “Amazon” which means “Exotic and Different”, so do is Amazon. Along with this, Amazon is the world’s biggest river and that reflects the size of Jeff’s company which he dreamt of. Bezos treated Amazon not merely as a retailer of consumer products but a technological company that helps to simplify the online transaction for consumers.
At the start, the company faced a harsh time and also lacked profit until the first quarter of 2001. But Bezos didn’t let the spirit down and argued that to become a successful online retailer, it needed to apply the slogan of “GET BIG FAST”. This led to the start of the success story of Amazon. It started growing faster with the number of its customer and revenue. It never looked back. The present revenue of Amazon is $280.522 billion.
Fortune 500
The fortune 500 is an annual list compiled and published by Fortune Magazine on the base of the total revenue of a company for the respective fiscal year. The companies which are private but whose revenues are made available are too included in the survey of fortune list. The first Fortune 500 list was published by Edgar p Smith in 1995. To be considered in this list is prestigious and reflects the high quality of performance made by a company.
And thus this prestige was earned by Amazon firstly in year 2002 when it was ranked 492 in the list. But the urge of getting ranked the highest led them to advance their growth and Amazon cracked the history in the year 2018 by getting ranked in top 10 Fortune 500 list. With the 21% rise in revenue growth, Amazon is placed 2nd on the list of Fortune 500.
This graph represents the growth of Amazon in the Fortune 500 list from 2002 – 2020.
Product Division
Amazon offers its customers the opportunity to reach a wide range of products at one click. There are over 36 categories of Amazon products and services. Starting from personal care to tech gadgets, customers could access it by Amazon. It has divided its product and services portfolio into many categories and departments.
Retail Goods include literally everything from A to Z as the logo displays. From books, videotapes, groceries, health, and personal care items, jewelry and watches, sporting goods, crookery, toys, and games, you can find anything on Amazon.com
Amazon Prime is a paid subscription service offered by Amazon and was started in the year 2005. It allows users to access more benefits than other amazon users. Amazon Prime benefits include two days of free delivery service, streaming music and videos, discounts to be first known.
Amazon Electronics includes the establishment of Kindle e-readers and Kindle Fire TV and tablets. Kindle-books started in November 2007 and made 2.7 million eBooks available to its customers until July 2014. It started its TV and tablet business separately the tablet by September 2012 and seeing its success introduce kindle fire TV in April 2014. Amazon too got into the smartphone business in July 2014.
Amazon Digital services include the Amazon Honor system which is now known as Amazon Payments, The services of digital music availability is part of these services.
Amazon Video includes Amazon direct videos that started in May 2016 that allows users to place videos available on rent, view free videos, or bundle them together.
Amazon Business is a service that provides registered business owners with a consolidated platform for buying products and supplies from Amazon. It was launched in 2012.
Amazon launched Web Services in 2002 that provides programmatic access to latent featured on its website. Also in 2006, it introduced Amazon Elastic Computer Clouding a virtual platform allowing users to use amazon infrastructure to run applications.
Amazon publishing was launched in May 2009. It is composed of 15 imprints, some are Amazon Encore, Amazon crossing.
Amazon local was launched in June 2011. It acts as a deal aggregator. It offers daily deals to over 100 regions in 36 US.
Amazon started its Retail store service by the name of Amazon Go in November 2015. Firstly as a bookseller and then cameras and sensors in retail shops and also started 4-star product sales in the retail stores.
In March 2015 Amazon started home service offering homeowners a marketplace for professional services.
Amazon’s cash and top-up service allows it, users, to add money to their Amazon account at a physical retail shop. It was a service that started in April 2017.
Marketing Strategy
Amazon focuses mostly on the product and place elements of the marketing mix. It provides widest ranges of products and thus tries to reach almost all categories in the age of the population. Along with offering a wide range of products, the pricing available on amazon is very competitive in the market; the reason behind this is their online platform of selling that helps them to save massive amounts.
The features of Amazon for its successful marketing strategy are consumer-friendly services, fast deliveries of products, and its price. These three of them act as Unique Selling Point of Amazon.
Amazon Marketing includes Amazon SEO, Amazon Advertising, and External marketing. Amazon SEO offers page to improve the visibility of the product. Amazon advertising includes advertising on Amazon devices, newsletter campaigns, Flyers in parcels. Offering discounts like sale prices, free shipping, buy one get one free, giveaway, vouchers. Amazon’s External marketing strategy includes pay-per-click advertising, content targeting, coupons, and social media.
It believes in the mantra shown in this diagram and thus spends a worthy amount on marketing. In 2019 amazon’s advertisement cost was $11 billion also the company ranked as lading advertiser in the US with measured media spend of approximately $1.84 billion.
Read about Amazon Logistics here:
https://thebrandhopper.com/2020/04/14/the-superiority-of-amazon-logistics-supply-chain/
Success Factors of Amazon
“OBSESS OVER CUSTOMER THAN COMPETITORS”
Customer Care– This is one of the significant keys to the success of Amazon. It succeeds in building a consumer paradise. By thinking and working for the customer benefits and ease led to the making of the giant. Having a wide range of products for the choice of customers, price available from small to large for all products, consumer-friendly website, and fast deliveries. All are the things that helped amazon to gain their customers.
Experiments– Amazon believes in experimenting with new things in new sectors, an example of this is the entry of Amazon in electronics by Kindle in 2007. Kindle is a widely popular model today. This led amazon pioneer the smart speakers, Alexa, Echo all in market as its electronic product.
Diversification– Amazon’s diversification of products has also lead to its success. Making itself available whether in IT support, clothing, furniture, books, music, and digital payments, amazon is continuously driving reach and relevance.
Long Term- Amazon’s long-term planning and orientation of the world view for the coming years let them build innovations that achieve success and win hearts all around the world. A roadmap of the innovation planning describes where the company is today and where it would be standing in future. Thus the perfect planning has also added a success factor of Amazon.
User Experience Design– This design provides more options, before they checkout in Amazon mobile app or website. The options include similar products of choice of customer and thus helps in increasing sales.
Success Strategy of Amazon in India
India has been a big opportunity for Amazon by the virtue of the population itself. Since its entry in India, Amazon has poured billions of dollars of investment to mark its presence in the country.
Amazon also invested a lot of time and energy in understanding the customer of the Indian market. This is clearly evident from the strategic decisions like the introduction of the option of “cash on delivery” as Indian customers were still not used to credit and debit card payments. This led to building the trust of Indian users in Amazon as a company that thinks about masses. Realizing the difficulty of network problems in India, Amazon designed a slimmed-down version of its application so that it could be accessed by most of the users even having low network speed. The company helped the Indian sellers come forward and sell their products on the company’s platform. Thus, this has led to an amazing and drastic increase in Amazon’s business in India as it has created an army of loyal customers and also earned fame by helping small scale businessmen.
Conclusion
This picture indicates the main factor why Amazon has become so successful. The structure of the company and its organization contribute to the shaping of the company and the five points mentioned in the picture reflect the perfect working of the company. Amazon has always worked with a “Win It” mindset. The contribution of CEO Jeff Bezos can be considered prominent in this success story. His saying “If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think” inspired each of the Amazon employees to take risks and consider each idea as an Asset. Thus Amazon’s success story has become an example for every business that is determined and works hard.
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