Too Long Didn’t Read version:
On December 5th, Amazon announced Amazon GO, a concept that aims to upend the grocery experience, using technology and smart process to target what they’ve identified as the biggest pain point of grocery shopping. Waiting in line to checkout.
First of all, it doesn’t matter whether Amazon GO works or not. It’s still an example of innovation that any marketer or entrepreneur should take inspiration from for 3 reasons:
- Picking a meaningful pain point for your target persona and going after it with courage
- Address a pain point elegantly through the smart use of technology, with iteration.
- A “vision-sell” launch that created immense buzz
Now the full post…
In case you missed it, Amazon announced on December 5th plans to launch a conceptual grocery store called Amazon GO. The simple selling point? To improve on a grocery store or convenience shopping experience that has been more or less the same for decades by tackling possibly what they believe is one of the most annoying / painful parts of the customer experience, namely the delay to actually get out of the store after you’ve spent all that time shopping.
Now I love this, and think it’s a great example for entrepreneurs and marketing leaders everywhere. It’s one of the reasons that I believe in Amazon for the longer term (besides the more obvious fact that from where I sit working in the cloud industry, AWS is going to go and go).
You see it doesn’t really matter to me whether this concept is ultimately successful or not. Most new innovations and inventions aren’t. The lessons though for you #mavericks out there are I believe 3-fold.
1) Customer-centricity unlocks opportunities to identify pains
First is that it’s only in attempting to build a true understanding of your buyer personas’ / customers’ experience that you ever have an opportunity to think through their relevant pains. I obviously don’t know what type of research Amazon did here. I hope that it wasn’t a bunch of folks in an ivory tower coming up with an idea (though hey that’s not bad if you have that kind of brainwave).
Really customer-centric companies find ways to look deeply at the customer experience. Maybe they did surveys. Better yet, maybe they followed real customers around groceries and observed the amount of time they spent at the end of the shopping experience checking out. There’s no success ultimately if you fasten onto the wrong pain point, however if you find one that is you believe really meaningful, and it’s backed by data, then having the courage to find a way to solve it is the next big step.
2) Relentlessly pursue an elegant solution to customer problems.
Of course sometimes, customers are willing to put up with any step forward if their pain is big enough. (Thinking of my trini peeps here. If you’ve ever been into most trini fast food restaurant, you know that we’ll take any crumb of an improvement in customer service, technology be damned). But as a fan of digital technology, I love to see an attempt to tackle the problem in an elegant way that combines tech and process. Even though Amazon is a big company and has some advantages here, there are tons of improvements that any entrepreneur can make on an identified pain. Even with lean startup methodology, marketers can focus on rapid iteration based on customer feedback as they work toward the ideal solution. Amazon will as they’ve done many times before test this concept, learn, and iterate, and that’s fine.
3) Vision-selling that creates buzz and conversation:
Last but not least, I love the buzz they were able to create. This isn’t the first time Amazon has done this simply by introducing a concept. I think back to the introduction of their amazon package delivery by drone concept that had much the same reaction in terms of press pickup and general conversation.
As a marketer, what they were able to do here is cool because regardless of whether you believe they’ll be successful or not, they had people talking about it. At SkyKick, there was a long email thread about the likely success or not of the concept, there were memes galore on the internet, and tons of press pickup. I’d argue that it’s not just because it’s Amazon, who are obviously a hot tech company, but also because the grocery shopping experience is one many can relate to, and so the idea of a solution to this problem was in and of itself very intriguing.
They seeded the idea, backed it up with visuals and information that helped sell the concept, and made for a very share-worthy story. Our friends at the word of mouth marketing association would be proud.
So in a nutshell, take these lessons from the launch of this concept, and pursue that level of customer-centricity, courage, and focus on solving a customer pains in your business or company tomorrow!
#thatsmaverick