If your business isn’t being threatened by Amazon, it’s a matter of time before it is.
Brian Dumaine, shares in Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It, Amazon is expanding into the smart home industry, making its own Wi-Fi-linked microwaves, clocks, and security cameras. In early 2018, it even invested in a small prefab housing manufacturer, suggesting that the company might someday build homes. Amazon already has a deal with Lennar, the nation’s largest homebuilder, to preinstall Alexa in all the company’s new homes.
Amazon is investing billions in new technologies promising to revolutionize last-mile delivery, including self-driving vans, robots that drop off packages at the door, and drones that can drop a box of new Bose headphones in your backyard. McKinsey & Company predicts autonomous deliveries will allow retailers to slash shipping costs by more than 40 percent. Amazon could save more than $10 billion a year, giving it yet another edge over its competitors.
Amazon Proof
It makes sense to consider what Amazon is not good at doing. Amazon provides great selection, service, attractive prices, and fast delivery.
Amazon itself has as strong identity. It isn’t good at is building a strong individual brand identity. Can you name the brand of Amazon’s chinos or its line of midcentury furniture?
It’s a highly efficient utility providing commodities to shoppers when and where they want them.
It’s not good at making its customers feel special.
Except for a Walmart or Alibaba, most businesses will have a hard time besting Amazon on both price and speed.
Retailers of the future, Dumaine explains, need to focus on four major areas to Amazon proof their business:
Dumaine cautions, “with Amazon’s invasion of brick-and-mortar retailing well under way, it won’t be enough to compete by mastering just one of these four strategies. Anyone who wants to keep up in an Amazonian world must eventually master at least two or three or even all four, because it’s certain that Amazon will be trying to master them as well in the empire of brick-and-mortar stores it’s building.”
My Personal Experiences
Strategy #4 In 2017, dissatisfied with the service and high price of replacing my prescription glasses, I published Are Entreprenuers Risk Takers – Originals Discovery.
Apparently social philanthropy was in the plan from the start. Warby Parker uses its social mission to create motivated teams of workers who provide superb in-store and online service—a hallmark of their brand. “The biggest benefit we’ve seen is on the employee side,” says CEO, Neil Blumenthal, “where we’ve been able to attract some of the most talented and passionate people in the world.” To help keep the passion going,
“What gets us psyched now,” says Blumenthal, “is that we want to demonstrate to the world that we can scale a business while doing good in the world, without charging a premium for our product.”
Strategy #2 Another way to Amazon Proof is to sell products that need a lot of handholding. If there were a award for being a mechanical klutz, yours truly would win it. I’ve hired Best Buy’s geek squad to install TV’s or get my existing remote to work correctly.
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NEXT BLOG – Clarity of Your Flywheel
As your business struggles to recover from COVID19, clarity is critical. Everyone at Amazon knows the company’s direction. It’s crystal clear due to the transparency of Amazon’s flywheel. Shouldn’t your team have clarity on your company’s direction? Next blog, how your flywheel drives clarity.