Not long ago, I went to Wal-Mart with my daughter. The store had certainly changed from the days of Mr. Sam Walton. Piles of discarded clothes languished in shopping carts outside the dressing room. Items were in disarray aisle after aisle. It took several tries to get help from distracted associates.
Later that day, I went to Amazon.com to buy a book. Like Wal-Mart, the Amazon homepage was chock-full of products — everything from running shoes to watches to power tools. And yes, books. I did some searching, but still needed to wade through several listings to find what I wanted.
Wal-Mart and Amazon are two corporate behemoths, and I certainly expect that they will remain successful enterprises for years to come. But I believe Amazon, like Wal-Mart, is at risk of becoming increasingly irrelevant to shoppers. Why? Because Amazon has lost the essence of what it is as a company and what its brand represents. Someday, our kids will be amazed to learn that Amazon was once the world leader in books.
This, I realize, must sound like heresy. Amazon sells everything, at such a great price! It’s so convenient! I agree. But here’s the thing: Convenience applies to online shopping in general. And while Amazon’s efficient operations and scale will make it tough for competitors to beat it on price, its brand is so diluted it’s hard to know exactly what the company sells.
Provide focused convenience
The fact that Amazon feels more and more like Wal-Mart — a seemingly random selection of unrelated items — will make it increasingly easy for competitors to pick off pieces of its business by providing more convenient ways to shop for specialty items.
If that sounds crazy, ask yourself why Amazon couldn’t beat Zappos in online shoes. It wasn’t for lack of trying: Amazon pushed its own Endless.com fashion site for years.
But Zappos had figured out that people wanted an easy way to shop for footwear. They hired customer service representatives who were prepared to talk shoes and built a website tailored to help people find the perfect pair. Consumers came to think of Zappos not as a place to buy shoes but as the place to buy shoes — even without discount prices. Finally,
Amazon wrote an $850 million surrender check to buy Zappos.
There’s a lesson here for all of us. Brands are most powerful when they do a specific something for a specific someone in a specific way. Ideally, the brand comes to be associated tightly in customers’ minds with a unique combination of these three elements.
Identify your brand
Too bad, for instance, Amazon didn’t start a separate brand for e-books — and call the new brand “Kindle.” Imagine how focused such a website would be: A one-stop shop for readers to find the best electronically published books.
Marketed properly, e-books could have become known as “Kindles” in the same way that tissues are commonly called “Kleenex.” What a waste of a great brand opportunity!
Instead, the Amazon homepage has women’s clothing featured alongside Kindle devices. That approach may work for the world’s largest online retailer, but only by virtue of its sheer size. For the rest of us, Amazon’s experience should be a warning: Don’t spread your brand too thin. ●
Jerry McLaughlin is CEO of Branders.com, the world’s largest and lowest-priced online promotional products company.
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