While it certainly feels like Amazon is to the retail industry what a fire is to a dry hillside, the high-volume retailer isn’t invincible, at least, according to a new Business of Fashion op-ed by Doug Stephens, aka, the “Retail Prophet”.
Titled “The Art of War with Amazon,” Stephens argues that Amazon, the infinitely-expanding entity that’s dramatically disrupted an industry ripe for disruption, isn’t without its vulnerabilities.
Sure, their growth numbers in the first quarter of 2017 look like computing errors — essentially posting 40 percent increases across the board — and their current share of the consumer product search process has a Tiger-Woods-in-his-2000-prime vibe, but, Stephens says, the way to compete with Amazon is to capitalize on things they aren’t bringing to the table.
Chief among those are three core terms often associated with customer experience: “fun, beautiful and joyous.” That’s because, as Stephens argues, “You’ll very rarely, if ever, hear Amazon described in these terms.”
It’s a compelling point. What Amazon delivers in regards to convenience, variety and speed, it lacks in personability, nuance, and, ultimately, satisfaction. “Amazon has — to its credit — reduced shopping to a science, but in doing so has also sapped it of its aesthetic, social, kinetic and human joy.”
“Amazon isn’t a fun experience,” Stephens writes. “Friends don’t meet for dinner and then go on an Amazon shopping spree. People don’t take selfies of themselves ordering things on Amazon. I’m a card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool Amazon Prime member and order plenty of stuff but I’ve never perceived my time doing it to be fun.”
You can read more about it at the Business of Fashion.
