THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
AMAZON FRESH TOM FENDER, DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR, TWC
AMAZON FRESH AND A FOUR LETTER WORD TWC’S TOM FENDER DISCUSSES THE TWO NEW AMAZON FRESH ‘JUST WALK OUT’ STORES AND
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HIGHLIGHTS THE POINT MOST PEOPLE SEEM TO FORGET.
hose of us who have visited either of Amazon’s new Fresh stores in Ealing and near Wembley have been impressed by the technology. But the biggest advantage Amazon has is not the technology. They have that in place now and it will improve. No, the biggest advantage Amazon has now – and is only going to grow with each customer transaction – is DATA. David Sellinger wrote in 2014: “While conventional wisdom has held that customer service is Amazon’s secret sauce, Bezos’s core innovation was to place data at the centre of his corporate culture.” We have had seven years to understand and replicate this. How many businesses have? So, having been asked by The Week In Retail for them, here are my thoughts on Amazon Fresh in the UK... Amazon wants to know everything about you – what you buy, what you listen to, what you’re spending money on. The one major gap in their knowledge bank is ‘food’, despite their purchase of Whole Foods and their work with Morrisons. Will Amazon need to open hundreds of ‘Fresh’ stores to get the intelligence/knowledge they need to understand the principles of convenience shopping? Probably not. You need to be an Amazon customer to get access to the store, but with more than 90% of the UK population thought to hold Amazon accounts, that shouldn’t be a problem. Those millions of customers have made life very easy for Amazon by helpfully giving the company their precise address. Maybe those clever people at Amazon will send offers direct to those people living close to a new Fresh store. I am one of those customers, so what does this mean for me?
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Amazon can link my food purchases to non-food purchases I make on the Amazon website, building up an even better understanding of me. Here are some examples: Q I buy a BBQ on a Monday for delivery on the Thursday – Amazon sends me incentives to buy burgers, beer, sausages. Q I buy gym equipment/sports equipment. They ping me offers on healthy foods too. Q I buy toys or items for a pet – they send me offers for dog/ cat food. Q I start buying items for new born babies – Amazon starts sending me offers for nappies, baby food etc. Amazon have all transactions logged to a specific individual – their name, address, email address, telephone number, interests, hobbies and a pretty good guess at their age. knowledge and data becomes the biggest competitive advantage in the food industry, not price, not range, not NPD, not promotions, not home delivery. Amazon will know what food products I buy on a regular basis. Amazon can send me offers to keep me loyal… or to encourage me to ‘trade up’, creating premiumisation on an
