Amazon "GO" Markets: Brand Innovation
Without a doubt, Amazon.com, Inc. has seen immense growth and prosperity from its conception to today. The 23-year-old company has undergone enormous changes and innovations. When we think back about ten years ago, we may remember Amazon as a massive online bookstore. At the same time, Amazon had just launched one of its first innovations that changed the way we consume and interacted with literature: Amazon Kindle. This new piece of tech hardware boasted the ability to browse and read thousands of eBooks at the touch of a fingertip. That was just the beginning in a series of Amazon’s brand innovations.
Nearly ten years later, Amazon has rapidly grown from an online bookstore into an online superstore, introduced home tech like Amazon Echo, and expanded into online streaming, video, music, and cloud services. More recently, however, Amazon presented “Amazon Go”, a fast-paced grocery store that requires no checkout, but rather “just walk out.” At the beginning of this year, Amazon Go was opened to the public near Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle. The compact corner store offers ready-to-eat meals, snacks, kitchen essentials, and even Amazon Meal Kits. “Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning.” –Amazon.com
OK, hold up, Amazon. When you phrase your store involving “deep learning” in relation its consumers, it comes off a little creepy and scary. However, this kind of learning is not new. This is the same type of learning Amazon.com uses when users make purchases off the website. This same algorithm is used on Amazon’s website to also track and study its consumer’s purchases and viewing patterns in an attempt to make suggestions for future purchases. It is just strange for this same type of process being used in a real, physical store. Amazon states that their technology senses when “products are taken or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart.” All in all, this takes a convenient store to a whole new level.
Amazon is all about efficiency, convenience, and productivity, and when you think about all the products developed by Amazon, the more this makes sense. Two-day shipping on something you probably didn’t need in the first place? No problem! Need to check the weather but too lazy to turn on the news and wait for the forecast? Just ask Alexa! Want to watch your favorite show on the go? It’s a few taps away! Many of the products that Amazon has produced to make our lives easier are often taken for granted. With the launch of Amazon Go, we witness another example of Amazon’s unwavering plan to create a society that can move even faster. From Amazon’s branding perspective, this constant push for innovation makes sense. As our society becomes more automated, Amazon has seized the opportunity to invest their company and brand to create numerous revolutionary technologies that contribute to the consumer’s desires to move quickly and efficiently, which has catapulted them to becoming a top-tier company with a hallmark for innovation.
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