Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly — A Conversation with Author & Scholar Emily West

By Nancy K. Herther (Writer, Consultant and former Librarian with the University of Minnesota Libraries) <herther@umn.edu>

Emily West is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has published research on consumer culture and media audiences. Her research on the commodification of sentiment and national branding has appeared in numerous journals. Her book, Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly was published by MIT Press earlier this year. Please Note: This interview was conducted in July 2022.

NKH: Your analysis focuses on the company’s power and influence, becoming “ubiquitous in our daily lives — [as] we stream movies and television on Amazon Prime Video, converse with Alexa, and receive messages on our smartphone about the progress of our pending order.” This wide range of services and products that Amazon offers is unique, even in this web-based global marketplace. Were you able to get any cooperation from Amazon in your study?

EW: Yes, the focus of my book is how Amazon has, in essence, branded its own ubiquity. Whereas many of the powerful, successful brands that we think about — like Disney, Nike, and McDonalds — have very prominent marketing campaigns with memorable images, stories, and lifestyles, Amazon’s marketing is quite low key in terms of its representational aspects, but is intensive in terms of relationship marketing.

For a while, Amazon even diverted its marketing dollars away from conventional ads to things that would enhance the customer experience, like fulfilling its rapid shipping promises, and improving the returns process. Today, Amazon does have advertising for some of its products and services, but it remains very focused on all the touchpoints that we have with it as a brand, optimizing those and making the consumption experience very seamless, while expanding into new products and services that make us more connected to Amazon throughout different parts of our lives.

Because the focus of the book is how Amazon builds relationships with customers, I focused on the company’s consumer-facing products, services, and marketing, rather than on the “behind-the-scenes.” When I started this project, I felt that Amazon’s ubiquity in our lives had been somewhat understudied, at least in my fields of Communication and Media Studies, and I concluded that a great place to start would be the absolute wealth of publicly available information about Amazon and how it presents its brand and builds relationships with consumers in ways that discourage us from noticing its power as a platform.

NKH: One of the most important contributions that you make is in teasing apart some of the complex components of Amazon’s reach (from content creation to end-user sales and service) and providing readers with approaches that adjust or expand existing “theories that were developed for norms of limited choice and mass audiences,” to the current expansive environment. You carefully built your case. Was this easy to do with such a huge company and one that doesn’t normally provide much openness or support for analysis of their operations?

EW: A challenging task with studying a company as large and wide-ranging as Amazon was deciding what the scope should be. I decided to focus on the brand-consumer relationship, and therefore on the products and services that most define our everyday interactions with the company. This led me first to Amazon’s focus on distribution of products — what material and infrastructural elements it has in place to deliver goods to us in record times, and how it promotes the speed and seamlessness of consumption. From an initial focus on distribution, I then focused on the various cultural products and services Amazon provides, from its initial product of books, to its various media streaming services, to the ways it offers a personalized experience to its users, exemplified by its digital voice assistant Alexa.

Then the book turns to the ways Amazon presents itself as a brand more generally — to the public and regulators through its brand image and rhetorical choices, and the ways it has had to adjust its brand image as it enters markets around the world. Across all these areas of inquiry, I note the various strategies that Amazon uses to make its size, the scope of its products and services, its market dominance, and its integration into our daily life seem normal, natural, and non-threatening. Amazon seeks to “fade into the woodwork,” so that it can become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy.

NKH: One of your themes focuses on the “bigness” that marks today’s entire digital economy for books, entertainment and ideas. Through their publishing activities, Amazon now impacts the very creation and distribution of ideas, stories and knowledge. You talk about this in terms of their role in the “democratization of culture” that has allowed writers to reach readers without traditional publishing houses as gatekeepers. Amazon’s own imprints are doing very well, as well as their sales of third-party merchandise across the globe. Can it ever become “too big?”

EW: While Amazon is now largely conceptualized as an ecommerce “everything store,” we should recall that it began as an online bookseller, and its dominance in the distribution and now production of media content has only grown. While other major platforms like Facebook and Google are routinely scrutinized in terms of how they shape our information environment, it’s important not to forget the role that Amazon plays in the distribution of information and culture, as it controls an estimated 50% of the U.S. book market and at least threequarters of eBook sales. One way of thinking about this is that Amazon isn’t just in the books marketplace; to a meaningful extent, it is the marketplace for books. Add to that now its role as a distributor and producer of video and audio content (both audiobooks on Audible and podcasts and music on the Amazon Music platform).

When we’re thinking about Amazon’s dominance in the information and entertainment businesses, there are a few issues I would point to.

NKH: The outsized influence Amazon has, particularly in the books business by both being the marketplace and competing in that marketplace, is a stark example of the “self-preferencing” and inherent unfair advantages enjoyed by digital platforms

EW: As you point out, Amazon is no longer just a retailer and distributor of books, but has expanded into an almost completely vertically integrated books business. It actually prints physical books with its print-on-demand business, it has numerous publishing imprints, and Amazon’s Kindle is the leading e-reader. The books business is a great place to notice how Amazon both provides a marketplace for book sales and marketing, and then participates in that very marketplace, but with the benefit of in-depth market intelligence about both consumers and competitors. Because so many people search for book titles, read reviews, and buy books on Amazon, it is almost essential that publishers buy Amazon’s advertising and marketing services in order to achieve visibility on the platform. These marketing fees have grown precipitously in recent years and publishers have made official complaints to federal regulators about the ways that Amazon links its marketing services to accessing retail distribution on the platform. But then, in addition, these publishers have to compete for reader attention with Amazon itself. There are credible allegations that Amazon advantages its own imprints in various ways on the site, in terms of search results, sales, and promotions. It is this kind of activity that legislation currently under consideration in the U.S. Congress — the American Innovation and Choice Online Act — seeks to prevent. Unsurprisingly, Amazon is vigorously lobbying against the passage of this bill.

NKH: While Amazon’s hands-off approach to media sales and distribution can be “democratizing” by eliminating the discretion of “middle-men,” it also contributes to its media distribution platforms being weaponized for disinformation.

EW: As you mentioned, I do argue in Buy Now that there are aspects of Amazon’s approach to bookselling that are “democratizing.” An online store with almost unlimited selection, where not just Amazon itself but third-party sellers sell books new and used? Online reviews where anyone can post their honest opinion about the book, good or bad? Amazon’s own focus on consumer behavior and engagement — through book purchases, clicks on the site, and details about how much and how quickly they read eBooks — all of which informs Amazon’s own publishing and marketing decisions? A userfriendly self-publishing platform where anyone can publish and sell their books, and even hope to earn a living if they find eager audiences? These are all surely signs of a more open, responsive bookselling and publishing space, where gatekeepers such as book buyers, publishing house editors, and critics enjoy less influence.

However, this is only part of the story. The openness of Amazon’s publishing and distribution platforms also illustrate what was actually good about gatekeeping, which was to prevent or at least limit the reach and amplification of books or other forms of media rife with disinformation, manipulation, and hate. Amazon has been relatively hands-off about the ways in which its platforms, be it Prime Video, Kindle Direct Publishing, the ecommerce website, or its consumer reviews, are all routinely taken advantage of by bad actors who seek to misinform or manipulate the public. Just last Fall, lawmakers chastised Amazon when the number one bestselling book on Amazon about Covid-19 was an anti-vaccine publication.

NKH: Amazon’s media subscriptions are a tool for collecting ongoing data about consumer interests and preferences, and building up the “moat” around the Amazon Prime membership.

EW: The final point I’d like to make about the sheer scale of Amazon’s media production and distribution businesses is that they play a key role in cementing Amazon’s market dominance in ecommerce and in consumer data more broadly. Prime Video, and to a certain extent Prime Reading, have played a significant role in recruiting people to the Prime Membership and then making it “sticky” — people are loathe to cancel their membership once they’ve become accustomed to these services. In my book, I argue that Amazon increasingly offering media “asa-service,” rather than selling discrete products or experiences like a book or a movie rental, cements the ongoing nature of the relationship between consumer and brand that is so valuable to Amazon. It’s valuable because Prime members spend so much more on the platform compared to non-members, and because Amazon can collect priceless data about what media we consume and how we consume it when we buy it “as-a-service.”

NKH: Certainly Jeff Bezos (as with Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg) were at the right place at the right time, and clearly they all had the imagination, tools and ability to create disruptive, yet highly profitable, companies. They also have done a good job in keeping ahead of any potentially serious competition. Do we have parallels to this in past history during times of major technological or other change?

EW: There’s no doubt that the “tech titans” you’ve mentioned had a combination of luck, energy, skill, and tremendous insight into the opportunities afforded by computing and digital networked communication. (By all reports, ruthlessness has also been a key ingredient for their success). But all the major tech giants (I think some are now calling this group MAMAA — Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Alphabet) have benefited not just from the insight of their founders but from contextual factors and factors specifics to the logics of digital platforms:

1) First mover advantage is particularly pronounced with digital platform companies. Once the initial capital investment has been made (to produce the search engine, to create the ecommerce website, to design the software) then you can add users without as much additional capital investment as would be needed with an offline business.

2) Network effects — the value of many of these services actually increases for users as more people use it. Many of us are on Facebook because so many other people we know are on it. Amazon sellers use the marketplace because so many shoppers look for products there; so many shoppers search Amazon for products because so many sellers are there. Network effects feed monopoly conditions.

3) Investment capital is particularly enthusiastic about anything that is a “tech” company as opposed to a more offline, familiar kind of business. Wall Street assumes that a “tech” company has more scope for growth and ability to move nimbly into more kinds of businesses than a more conventional business. So Amazon has been able to attract so much more investment capital than competitors in its various businesses, and also been able to undercut competition with lower prices or more expensive customer service for extended periods because investors were willing to tolerate lack of profitability for so long, in the interest of longer term growth potential.

4) The data is the real product. While the big tech platforms appear on the surface to operate in somewhat different business areas, they all harvest unfathomable amounts of data in the course of doing those businesses, and that data in turn can be monetized (through digital ad businesses for example) or used to identify new business areas and enjoy competitive business advantage.

The clearest parallel we might reflect on is the rise of the so-called “robber barons” or the monopolies in oil and the railroads in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Technological innovation and new markets exploded opportunities, and the legal and regulatory lag allowed for very rapid concentration in industries which in turn facilitated sky-high profits. This state of affairs inspired the wave of anti-trust lawmaking and enforcement that occurred in the early 20th century, and many observers are hoping that we are on the cusp of a similar wave now in the 21st century.

U.S. lawmakers have been slow compared to other places, particularly the European Union, to recognize the anticompetitive practices of the “big five,” particularly because these companies seem like U.S. business success stories and there has been a lot of user enthusiasm and satisfaction with many of these services. Lawmakers have been particularly leery about scrutinizing Amazon which has consistently been rated one of the most trusted and loved brands in America. But now regulators are becoming more aware of the drawbacks of such market concentration in ecommerce and some of Amazon’s other businesses, and we’re starting to see more attention to issues of self-preferencing and other anti-competitive behaviors, more call for scrutiny of corporate acquisitions that further cement market dominance and discourage competition, and questions about the ways that the platforms and digital advertising markets engage in surveillance and monetize user data.

NKH: The Internet afforded Amazon’s easy ability to quickly disrupt, respond and innovate in the early days of Internet commerce. Your publisher (MIT Press) calls your book “a cautionary tale of bigness in today’s digital economy.” Throughout history, size and power have always mattered. Once we have these dominate/controlling behemoths, how do you see the opportunities for adjustment/change/challenges — even as issues of common good or larger societal benefit arise?

EW: My book is not against digital platforms, or ecommerce, per se. Rather, I use the case of Amazon to illustrate how entangled our lives have become with digital platforms and to highlight the extent and nature of platform power. I think there are important conversations to be had, not just by lawmakers but society-wide, about how we can strike a reasonable balance between the convenience, efficiency, and innovations that digital platforms can provide with the need to promote competition, low barriers to entry in the digital economy, privacy, and good corporate citizenship. I don’t necessarily take issue with any particular product or service that Amazon provides (although I do have some reservations about its surveillance products and services like facial recognition and video doorbells). Rather, the integrated nature of its products and services, and the resulting market dominance that results, shifts Amazon’s influence from merely “a company in the marketplace,” to that of governance — an entity that sets standards, provides infrastructure, and dictates terms to market actors and governments. That’s the type of corporate power that can become anti-democratic, and that doesn’t serve us in the long run.

Currently in Congress there is legislation being considered that would put in place common-sense checks on the power of platforms, including rules against self-preferencing, and more scrutiny of corporate acquisitions. Beyond that, an organized consumer movement might advocate for limits on the degree of market share and integration of products and services that a single company should have. For example, should Amazon be able to dominate both ecommerce and last-mile delivery? Should it be able to dominate both ecommerce and cloud services?

Some readers may conclude that boycotting Amazon is the way to go, and that’s certainly a valid response. However, it’s good to keep in mind that this is not necessarily what Amazon worker activists have called for, in terms of solidarity from consumers. Also, I am skeptical that individualized consumer decision-making will have a meaningful effect on Amazon’s fortunes or business practices. Given Amazon’s size and the scope of its businesses (such as Amazon Web Services, the leading cloud computing service that undergirds a great deal of the Internet that we use), I don’t think it’s realistic to suggest that individual consumers can serve as the primary check on Amazon through their day-to-day purchasing decisions.

Rather, individual-level consumer activism must be paired with some kind of collective organizing and demands from consumers for more transparency in the logic of how platforms like Amazon work, how they use and profit from our data, and support for regulatory efforts.

Given Amazon’s focus on personalized service, and the way most of us interact with its services online, from home, there are few opportunities for us to gather as Amazon customers or be able to imagine ourselves as a bloc with shared interests. But unless Amazon customers can find a way to organize, Amazon will continue to speak on our behalf, and justify its size, market dominance, and business practices through its focus on our customer convenience and delight.

NKH: Earlier this year, Amazon opened and then quickly shuttered their brick-and-mortar stores in North America, excluding their Whole Foods franchise — including two here in Minnesota — without much notice or explanation. This approach certainly is a different approach than growth through acquisition, which is so popular in most other industries. Was this another learning/experimental effort or an example of the shifting sands of a trial balloon? Typically, there has been no clear signal from Amazon.

EW: Yes, in March it was revealed that Amazon would start shutting a few of its brick-and-mortar store concepts, including Amazon Books, a national chain of bookstores which started in 2015. I visited a couple of these stores as well as another store concept that will be closed, Amazon 4-Star, which featured products available on Amazon rated 4 stars and above.

Amazon has so much investment capital and profit to work with, as you indicate; it tries all kinds of things that don’t work out and it then abandons after a little while. I would put these store concepts into that category, and add that the timing — with the pandemic hurting brick-and-mortar retail and super-charging e-commerce, and then labor becoming harder to find and more expensive also due to the pandemic, likely played a role. These store concepts were meant to be engines for “discovery” — where you go find products you weren’t necessarily aware of or looking for — rather than for “search,” which is the strength of the ecommerce site.

They also functioned as showrooms for Amazon’s everexpanding personal electronics selection (Amazon has more than 50% of the ecommerce market in computers and consumer electronics, which includes many of their own devices, such as the Kindle and Echo Smart Speakers).

But this doesn’t mean that Amazon is done with brick-andmortar store concepts by any means. It still has its high-end convenience store format Amazon Go, owns Whole Foods Market, and is developing a department store concept that will likely emphasize its fashion lines and again, consumer electronics showrooming. Amazon has been developing its “Just Walk Out” technology in Amazon Go, and is now testing it in Whole Foods Market locations — this is where cameras, weights, and other surveillance technologies allow Amazon account holders to just pick goods up and “walk out” with them and be automatically billed.

I believe Amazon will continue pursuing brick-and-mortar because it allows the company to round out the valuable consumer data it has, adding fresh foods and grocery to the wealth of intelligence it has about the things people typically buy on its ecommerce site. Amazon’s brick-and-mortar retailing integrates the personalization and tracking of online shopping into offline space, completing the circle of visibility it has on consumer habits and preferences.

Amazon also, to my mind, promotes retail space that is less public and democratic than how we have traditionally understood retail spaces to be. For example, in the Amazon Books stores, prime members paid lower prices than nonmembers. In most Amazon Go locations, you can’t enter or buy anything unless you have an account with Amazon and have downloaded the app — “Scan to Enter.” Amazon is promoting these kinds of cashless, “members only” models, which shift the way that retail space has been open to all who may enter, offering at least formally a kind of equal footing to all customers.

NKH: In your co-edited The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, some of the authors examined how the role of critics and reviews are described as “fading in an environment where ‘spin’ is more important than critics or other traditional means of assessment.” How do you see the future for independent critique in this age of “promotional culture?”

EW: Amazon, of course, has a lot of resources to devote to lobbying lawmakers and regulators to promote its own interests. It’s no accident, many people think, that one of its new headquarters is being built in Arlington, Virginia, near Washington DC, that Jeff Bezos bought the largest private home in DC and has hosted generously there, or that he bought the Washington Post.

But I argue in my book that one of the most powerful tools that Amazon has to discourage consumer activism and regulatory scrutiny is the relationship that it has built with its customers, which have made many people feel that they depend on Amazon almost as a utility. When I conceptualize Amazon as the “ultimate service brand,” the corollary is that it’s shifting what it means to be a consumer in the digital economy from a “choosing subject” to a “served self.” The ongoing, familiar, even intimate nature of the relationship that many people have with Amazon — happy to have the company “get to know us” so it can provide ever-more personalized and convenient service — simultaneously makes it less likely that consumers will be as critical and discerning about the company as they might be with other product and service providers.

Through personalization, subscriptions, provision of so many things “as-a-service,” the bundled nature of the Prime membership, and an increasing amount of streamlined voicebased interaction, Amazon steadily makes more choices for the consumer, taking on that effort or labor as part of the service it offers. While our power in the marketplace may be circumscribed and limited, choice is nevertheless key to that power, and so this shift from the choosing subject to the served self is one that concerns me, in that it makes consumers less likely to “shop around,” likely to do more and more within Amazon’s platforms (thereby contributing to its market dominance), and less likely to be critical and engage in activism.

As I discuss in the Conclusion to Buy Now, Amazon workers, both in the warehouses and its corporate offices, have been the most vocal and impactful in critiquing Amazon’s business practices. But they also have the most to lose. I wrote this book because I think consumers must be more engaged with the ways that a company like Amazon infiltrates our lives and then uses our delight and convenience as a reason to justify its monopolistic control of markets, its ruthless extraction of productivity from workers, and its poor treatment of many third-party sellers on its platform.

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