The Strategy behind Amazon’s Ups and Downs
The last quarter has been a busy one for Amazon, filled with ups and downs, successes and failures, laurels and controversies. The online commerce giant has had some good wins in the e-reading space that it continues to dominate, and some bad losses in newer markets such as smartphones. Even in its home zone of publishing, Amazon has been in some serious conflict with publishers over the issue of e-book pricing, and its dispute with Hachette Publishing made some headlines.
As for the new Fire phone, the market expectations were huge. However, Amazon’s attempt to make a strong entry in the already dominant smartphone market was deemed a failure, with prices for the phone being dropped from two hundred dollars to a completely negligible ninety-nine cents in just a month.
However, such downs have rightly not held the retailer back. Amazon’s upcoming partnership with Simon & Schuster will be a big win. It is one of the top five publishers in the US, and entering into an agreement to publish and distribute their e-books will be a big contract for Amazon. In the same token, the initial reviews for Amazon’s Kindle Voyage e-reader are very positive, and just in time for the holiday season.
Online sales are expected to have a huge presence this shopping season, and as one of the veterans in this space, Amazon is gearing up to meet and exceed demand by hiring eighty thousand seasonal workers. But while growth continues, controversies around its monopolistic hold on e-commerce are also on the rise.
The interesting takeaway here is that Amazon does not shun failures. In fact, its leaders try to see how to learn from failures and diversify even more. That is exactly what Jeff Bezos has been doing in his latest hiring strategy for the AmazonFresh initiative: specifically hiring people who failed where he wants to succeed. Getting people who failed in other online grocery delivery services to work for Amazon’s means AmazonFresh can benefit from their experience.
At the end of the day, all that matters is how a company further builds on successes—and how it addresses failures by the lessons they have to offer.
