I believe that life is a classroom. Every day, life happens to us in ways that are instructional, educational, and didactic – but only if we treat them as such. Too often, we “skip” life school, pretending instead that keeping our noses to the grindstone will somehow compensate for this lost education.
Don’t get me wrong; I believe in hard work. I wouldn’t be where I am, writing this blog, if I didn’t. I suppose what I also believe in is never being off the clock. That is to say, our work doesn’t end as we drive away from the office each day. In fact, if we’re true bull’s eye marketers, that’s where the real work begins.
Case in point: to know consumers, you must be a consumer. So, how do you consume? Why do you buy what you buy? Shop where you shop? Eat where and what you eat? How do you decide which movie to take your family to over the weekend? Why did you buy that particular necklace for your spouse or that pair of shoes for your child?
In other words, you made a buying decision based on certain criteria and influences. How did the marketer target YOU?
It’s not a simple question, but understanding the answer is crucial to helping you target others. One company that can help us answer this question is the same company who was so integral while doing the research for this very book: Amazon.com.
You might be surprised to know that Amazon.com has a slogan that’s quite telling about their corporate philosophy – and how they target customers. That slogan is, “Work hard, have fun, make history.” They also have a similar vision statement: “Our vision is to be earth’s most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”
Since its online debut in July 1995 under the leadership of founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com has grown from being “the world’s largest bookstore” into a service-driven leader and audience-targeting master. This was no accident.
As Bezos himself wrote in a letter to investors back in 1997, “From the beginning, our focus has been on offering our customers compelling value. We realized that the Web was, and still is, the World Wide Wait. Therefore, we set out to offer customers something they simply could not get any other way, and began serving them with books. We brought them much more selection than was possible in a physical store (our store would now occupy 6 football fields), and presented it in a useful, easy-to search, and easy-to-browse format in a store open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. We maintained a dogged focus on improving the shopping experience…”
Fortunately, not much has changed. I discovered this as I set out to learn more about targeted marketing …. (continued next time)
