Amazon's Remarkable Rise: From Books to Alexa - Essay Sample

Introduction

Amazon has, with no doubt doing extremely well in online retail since it was founded in 1994 and started selling books online. It has risen to be a giant in inventory, customer service, and shipping. Additionally, Amazon deals with music, movies, and apps. In 2014, Amazon developed Amazon Alexa, which is the science of Amazon Echo. The Amazon Echo listens to people, translates their voices into commands that facilitate playing of music, turn on the lights, or even order products from Amazon. The voice-controlled virtual assistant is amazing and can answer even questions regarding weather or search and play music. Amazon, however, needs to develop a marketing strategy for pricing and to distribute the product.

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Distribution Strategies

Voice assistants are gaining popularity, and they are used in homes as well as offices. In the United States, there are approximately 45 million voice assistants, and the number is expected to rise (Cheng, 2018). They are beneficial you the brands and marketers as they are used in advertising products and services to potential customers. Amazon Echo is the most popular as it owns 70percent of the market share. The popularity of the assistant can be attributed to its ability to provide information, order items, and make shopping lists.

Although Amazon Echo is the most used assistant, there is a need to capture the remaining 30 percent of the market share (Cheng, 2018). Amazon's exclusive distribution strategy is used in the distribution of Amazon Alexa. There are no intermediary retailers or wholesalers for the voice assistant. Amazon Alexa can only be bought on Amazon Website. Amazon delivers the speakers direct to the end-user, which means that it is a B2C retailer. To achieve maximum penetration of the device to the market, Amazon should consider the distribution of the product selling the product through retailers and wholesalers to make it accessible to potential consumers. Alexa is a device that can be used both for personal purposes as well as for business purposes. By using intensive distribution, the company ensures that its product is everywhere, thereby attractive massive usage.

The tradeshow held in the New Jersey Institute of Technology also helped in marketing the virtual assistant (Cheng, 2018). Amazon Alexa staff interacted with the attendees, and high lightened them about the voice assistant. The attendees were also taught how to code and had an opportunity of asking questions on how the voice assistant works. The live coding sessions and interviews conducted by the Alexa team also helped in marketing the product.

Dynamic/Static Pricing Strategies

The main goal of any retail company is to achieve maximum profit; hence, the reason why static pricing is not the right strategy because the value of products changes each day (Ryan, 2016). However, if you are the manufacturer of the product, you can afford to use the static pricing. Many online retailers prefer a dynamic pricing strategy because they can adjust the price to react to the competition in the market. To maximize the sales of the device, Amazon should consider adopting a dynamic pricing strategy.

A dynamic pricing strategy is a pricing strategy that can be adopted by Amazon in marketing Amazon Alexa. One of the advantages of dynamic is that it is effective in increasing sales, maximizing profits, and increasing demand (Ryan, 2016). Static pricing, on the other hand, helps in creating customer loyalty and avoids offending the customers by frequently altering the prices. Through static pricing, it is easy to forecast and estimate the sales and profits from the device.

Daily Pricing, Promotion Pricing, List Pricing

Daily pricing is a pricing strategy where a business alters the price of a product (s) daily like the stock market prices (Bodea, & Ferguson, 2014). Amazon pricing is an example of a company that adopts daily pricing as its pricing strategy. In daily pricing, the price of a product may either increase or decrease, so the customers have to compare prices for several days to ensure that they buy the product where the price is relatively low. To increase the sales for the virtual assistants, Amazon should consider using promotional pricing.

Promotional pricing is a strategy where retail offers low prices for the products to entice the customers to use the product (Bodea, & Ferguson, 2014). Promotional pricing creates customer excitement and encourages impulse buying. The promotional pricing lasts for a short duration of time, so customers are at the pressure of the product before the trial duration ends. List pricing is a pricing strategy where the manufacturer sets the price of a product. The retailers, therefore, do not have control over the prices, so they have to sell the product at a price listed on the package.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Amazon Alexa is a voice-controlled virtual assistant that is transforming both smart homes and businesses. It is the most popular as it helps in listening to people, translating their voices into commands that facilitate the playing of music, turning on the lights, or even ordering products from Amazon. To increase the usage of the assistant, Amazon should consider adopting static pricing or promotional pricing.

References

Bodea, T., & Ferguson, M. (2014). Segmentation, revenue management, and pricing analytics. Routledge.

Cheng, A. (2018). What Amazon Is Doing To Keep Alexa In The Lead. Retrieved 4 October 2019, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/andriacheng/2018/07/26/what-amazon-is-doing-to-keep-alexa-in-the-lead/#6f028bc7fc68

Ryan, D. (2016). Understanding digital marketing: marketing strategies for engaging the digital generation. Kogan Page Publishers.