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Inside Amazon’s Growth Strategy

If the key to success is focus, why does Amazon work?

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Since Amazon started as an online retailer in 1994, it has expanded into streaming, cloud computing, content creation, and even groceries. But traditional business strategy tells us that the key to success is focus. So, why does Amazon work?

“I think in Amazon’s case, everything is very tightly connected. If you remove one part, the whole becomes less,” says Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta . “That’s the key question: are the pieces fitting together nicely, or they just happen to be another business because it’s profitable?”

Gupta has studied Amazon’s growth strategy and he tells Cold Call host Brian Kenny how Amazon looks beyond traditional industry boundaries to define their competitors and why connecting products and services with their customers is at the core of their strategy.

Key episode topics include: business models, growth strategy, operations and supply chain management, innovation, technology and analytics, online retail, customer-centricity, customer experience, competitive strategy.  

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

• Listen to the original HBR Cold Call episode: If the Key to Business Success Is Focus, Why Does Amazon Work? (May 2019)
• Find more episodes of Cold Call .
• Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org .

HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Strategy , case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock new ways of doing business. Amazon started as an online retailer back in 1994. Since then, it has expanded into streaming, cloud computing, content creation, and even groceries. But if traditional business strategy tells us that the key to success is focus – why does Amazon work ? Today, we bring you a conversation with Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta – who has studied Amazon’s growth strategy. You’ll learn how Amazon builds its business around its customers — rather than its products and services. You’ll also learn how they look beyond traditional industry boundaries to define their competitors – and why connecting products and services with their customers is at the core of their strategy. This episode originally aired on Cold Call in May 2019. Here it is.

BRIAN KENNY: In the world of computer science, Jon Wainwright is kind of a big deal. A pioneer of computer languages, he was the principle architect of both Script 5 and Manuscript. What makes Jon a legend has nothing to do with programming. Let me explain. On April 3, 1995, Jon was in need of some work-related reading material. So, he fired up his T1 modem and navigated the fledgling internet to the beta version of a new online bookstore. With the click of a mouse, he became the very first customer to make a purchase on Amazon.com. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, the book he purchased, never became a best seller. But Amazon took off like a rocket ship and hasn’t slowed down since. With a market cap larger than all other retailers combined, including Walmart, Amazon owns 49% of all online sales. In the time it takes me to read this introduction, the company will earn over 300,000 dollars. Will we ever see the likes of it again? Today, we’ll hear from professor Sunil Gupta, about his case entitled, “Amazon in 2017.” I’m your host Brian Kenny. You’re listening to Cold Call, part of the HBR Presents network. Sunil Gupta is an expert in the area of digital technology and its impact on consumer behavior and firm strategy. He is the author of the recently published, Driving Digital Strategy, a guide to re-imagining your business. This case is the perfect stepping off point to cover some of the ideas in that book, Sunil. Thank you for joining me today.

SUNIL GUPTA: Thank you for having me.

BRIAN KENNY: This is your second spin I think on Cold Call. We appreciate you coming back.

SUNIL GUPTA: I enjoy doing this.

BRIAN KENNY: Good, as long as it’s not too painful for you. I like having you here. I’ve had an opportunity to read the book. The case I think is really kind of a great foundational piece to launch into some of the ideas. I’m going to assume anybody listening to this podcast has purchased something on Amazon or watched something on Amazon Prime. I had forgotten about their modest beginnings and just how much they’ve grown and expanded and changed. The case was a great reminder of that. We’ll get into some of that. Let me start by asking you, just to set it up for us. What led you to write the case?

SUNIL GUPTA: As you said, everybody knows Amazon. At the same time, Amazon has become quite complex. I mean, they have gone into businesses that defy imagination. That raises the question, is Amazon spreading itself too thin? Are they an online retailer? Are they video producers? Are they now making movies? In strategy, we learn, everybody should focus. Obviously Jeff Bezos missed that class.

BRIAN KENNY: He didn’t come to HBS by the way.

SUNIL GUPTA: You sort of start wondering as to, what is the magic behind this? What is the secret sauce that makes Amazon such a huge success? The market gap almost touched a trillion dollars a few months ago.

BRIAN KENNY: Insane.

SUNIL GUPTA: That was the reason why I thought A, everybody knows about it, and B, it’s hugely successful and C, his business model seems to defy logic.

BRIAN KENNY: The case we know by the title takes place in 2017. Maybe you can just start us off by setting it up. How does the case open up?

SUNIL GUPTA: At that point in time, Amazon had just bought Whole Foods, which was very counterintuitive because Amazon has been an online player. So why is it getting into offline business? That was against his grain as an online player. The second thing is food is a very low margin category. You sort of say, Amazon is a technology company, its stock is going to stratosphere. Why buy a low margin business that Amazon actually had been trying Amazon Fresh for 10 years and hasn’t succeeded? Why don’t they give up? That was a starting point. But of course, the case describes all the other 20 different things that they have done in the last 20 years and asked the question, what is Amazon up to?

BRIAN KENNY: Amazon and Jeff Bezos are sort of synonymous. He’s a cult of personality there, kind of like Steve Jobs was with Apple. Jeff’s been in the news a lot lately for other reasons, you know, personal reasons. He is still obviously, probably one of the best known CEOs in the world. What’s he like as a leader?

SUNIL GUPTA: I don’t know him personally. Based on the research that I’ve done, he certainly is very customer obsessed. He’s focused on customer. He always says, “You start with the customer and work backwards.” He still takes evidently calls on the call center. The culture is very entrepreneurial, but also very heart driven. I mean, the idea for example of Amazon Prime evidently didn’t come from Jeff Bezos, it came from a low person in the organization. He’s quick to adapt the ideas if he sees some merit in it. It’s almost a 25-year-old company that still works like a startup.

BRIAN KENNY: Was the original concept for Amazon … I mean, I know he sold books originally. Was it ever really a book company?

SUNIL GUPTA: I think it started more as an online retailer. Book was an easy thing because everybody knows exactly what you’re buying. It’s no concern about the quality. His premise in the online store was a very clear value proposition of three things. One was convenience that you can shop in your pajamas, so we don’t have to fight the traffic of Boston or Los Angeles. The second was infinite variety. I don’t have the constraint of a physical store. Even if I have Walmart, which is a huge store, I can only stock so many things. As a result, you only have the top sellers. In Amazon, I can have the long tail of any product if you will. The third was price. It was cheaper, simply because I don’t have fixed costs of the brick and mortar store. I can reduce the cost structure and therefore I can be cheaper. Those were the three key value propositions. That’s how it started. The idea was, I’ll start with books and then move on to electronics and other things. But then of course, it moved far beyond being an online retailer.

BRIAN KENNY: This gets into some of the ideas in your book. I was really intrigued in the book about the notion of what kind of business are we in? Just that question alone. At face value, it looked like Amazon was a retailer. They went in directions that nobody could have imagined. The case really goes into some of a litany of all the things they tried.

SUNIL GUPTA: Right. Again, the purpose of the case was to illustrate as to how these are all connected. From a distance they look completely disconnected and completely lack of focus. Let’s start with how the concept evolved. The first thing was, as I said was online retailer. Very soon it became a marketplace. Now, what is a marketplace? They basically allow third party sellers also to sell on the Amazon platform, which is distinct from a traditional retailer. Walmart doesn’t allow me to set up shop within Walmart, but Amazon allows me to do that. Now, why would they do that? Simply because it increases the variety that they can sell on the platform. Therefore, consumers are quite happy with the variety of the product they can get on Amazon. Amazon gets commission without having the inventory and the capital cost. Perhaps the most important thing of becoming a platform is it creates what we call the network effects. If there are lots of products, everything I can buy is available on Amazon. More consumers are likely to go there. Because there are more consumers, more sellers are likely to go there. It just feeds in itself. More consumers mean more sellers, more sellers mean more consumers, and it becomes a virtual cycle. That’s why there is only one Amazon. Even if I start an online retail, which is in many ways better than Amazon, nobody’s coming to gupta.com, because buyers and sellers are not there. That became the next phase, change from online retailer to marketplace. Then it went into AWS, and you sort of say, “Well, how can it go into a technology company and compete with IBM and Microsoft?” It was competing with Walmart before.

BRIAN KENNY: That’s the web services division.

SUNIL GUPTA: That’s the web services. In fact, at that point in time, Wall Street was very down on that. They said, “What is Bezos thinking?” The idea again, if you think about it, it was very simple. Amazon was building this technology for its own purpose. And then, they started giving this technology, using this technology for the third party sellers, who were selling on its platform.

BRIAN KENNY: Let me just interrupt for a second. That’s a marked, a marked change in direction. They had always been a consumer platform. Now they’re in a business-to-business play. I bet a lot of consumers don’t even know about Amazon Web Services.

SUNIL GUPTA: Correct. Again, not in a traditional sense saying, “This is my market.” That’s simply saying, “I have this capability. There’s a demand for this capability. Can I do it?” Part of that was opportunistic also. If you remember in 2001, the dot.com bubble crashed. If you’re a B2C company, you hedge your bets and get into B2B business. Part of that may have been luck. That was, again, a change of direction. And then, Amazon started producing hardware, Kindle, and now competing with Apple. You sort of say, why is an online retailer getting into hardware production? If you think a little bit about it, the answer is very easy. Kindle was designed to sell eBooks as people move from buying the hard copy books to downloading the eBooks. The Kindle is the classic razor and blade strategy. I sell razors cheap in order to make money on the blades. I’m not making that much money Kindle, but I’m making money on eBooks, which is very different from Apple’s strategy. Apple actually makes money on devices, but Amazon is not making money on devices, or at least not making huge money on devices. Similarly, it moved into online streaming of the video content and suddenly became a competition on Netflix. You sort of say, “Why is a retailer becoming a competition on Netflix?” Again, if you think a little about it, the answer becomes clear. As you and I moved on to not buying DVDs, but actually streaming the stuff, that’s what Netflix did. They used to send the DVDs to us.

BRIAN KENNY: I remember that. I still have a couple.

SUNIL GUPTA: Amazon is very good in sort of moving with the customer. If the customer moved from buying books to eBooks, I move in that direction. If customers move from buying DVDs to streaming, I move in that direction. Now, can Amazon do it? Of course, they can. They have AWS. Netflix is one of the largest customers.

BRIAN KENNY: Are they leading or following? Are they creating a market? In the beginning it seemed like they created something entirely new. Now, are they anticipating, or are they just sort of reacting to what’s happening?

SUNIL GUPTA: No, it’s a combination of both. In some ways they are actually following the consumer behavior and say consumers are moving to a streaming and move with that. They were not the first ones. Netflix actually started the streaming thing. Then, they sort of come up with it. If you think about it, Amazon became not only distributing third party content on videos, but now they have Amazon Studio. I mean, they are making movies, and the competition now becomes Hollywood instead of Walmart. You sort of say, “What has gone wrong with Jeff Bezos? Why is he making movies?” Movies are pretty expensive business and highly risky. The key to that is to understand the purpose of the movies. The purpose of the movies is to hook the consumers from Amazon Prime. If you remember, Amazon Prime started with 79 dollars per year. The benefit at that time was two-day free shipping. Now, you and I are smart enough to sort of do the math in our heads saying, how many shipments do we expect next year, and is 79 dollars worth it or not? Bezos does not want you to do that math. He basically says, “Oh, by the way, I’ll throw in some free content, some free music, some free unique movies.” Now you can’t do the calculation. Why does he care about Prime? Right now, Amazon has about one hundred million Prime customers globally. Let’s say I get an average 100 dollars per year, that’s 10 billion dollars in my pocket before I open the store.

BRIAN KENNY: Right.

SUNIL GUPTA: The research also shows that Amazon Prime customers buy three to four times more than non-Prime customers. I mean, if you’re a Prime customer, you don’t even price shop.

BRIAN KENNY: Once you’re Prime, you’ve got to justify being a member. You buy everything on Amazon.

SUNIL GUPTA: Exactly. Your purchase increases. You become price sensitive, which is fantastic. In fact Jeff Bezos has gone public and say that every time we win a Golden Globe award for our content, we sell more shoes. The purpose of creating their own content is not to make money on the content. This is another different razor to sell you more shoes. Once you understand that, what looks like disparate business is actually extremely tied together.

BRIAN KENNY: It all comes right back to the core. They haven’t always had good ideas. Have they had some misses along the way too?

SUNIL GUPTA: I think the biggest failure was Fire phone.

BRIAN KENNY: Remind us what that was?

SUNIL GUPTA: Amazon launched their own phone. They were obviously very late in the market. iPhone was already there. Samsung had done very good. You have two major players, if not many others, who are very well established. Consumers love their iPhones. The question of course was, why is Amazon launching the phone? What are the odds of success? Clearly the odds of success were low. The reason to launch it was they didn’t want to be beholden to the iPhone or the Googles of the world. They know that the world is moving towards mobile, in terms of shopping, certainly in emerging markets, everybody’s moving to mobile shopping. If tomorrow Apple or Google sort of restrict the Amazon use, or availability of Amazon, because they’re all competing with each other now. It becomes a challenge. To Amazon’s credit, I mean, it’s true for all innovations. Not all innovations succeed. You’ve got to take a shot. If you think about it, all the technology and thought process that got into Fire phone, was not completely a waste. That went into Echo. Now Alexa is a big hit.

BRIAN KENNY: They’re a market leader in that in that. Let’s talk a little bit about the ideas that underlie his Amazon case. I think it starts with knowing what business you’re in. Your book addresses this. I think I know we’re in the education space here at Harvard Business School. Should we be thinking about other businesses?

SUNIL GUPTA: You’re right. The bigger question that Amazon case raises is: how do you define what business you are in? Most of us tend to define business by the traditional industry boundaries. If I’m a bank, I’m in banking and other banks are my competition. I think industry boundaries are getting blurred today. Amazon can get into banking. I have lots of customers, I can start giving loans to small and medium enterprises.

BRIAN KENNY: They know a lot about those customers.

SUNIL GUPTA: They know a lot about customers. The key asset is now customers and data, and not the product and services that you offer. Once you know about customers, you can do lots of different things. One thing is, I would say is the industry boundaries are getting blurred. You need to think about not competition, but what do customers want. Do I have capabilities to serve that? The second thing is the traditional definition of where competitive advantage comes from is changing. What I learned, in doing my MBA class many years ago, we used to read Michael Porter’s competitive strategy stuff. If I were to simplify and summarize what I learned in competitive strategy was competitive advantage comes from making your product better or cheaper. Differentiation or cost leadership, which makes sense. If you think about it, it’s very much product-focused. I think in today’s world, competitive advantage comes from connecting products and connecting customers. The Kindle and eBooks is an example of connecting products, multiple products right? Making movies of Amazon and selling more shoes is connecting products. Razor and blade have been around forever. I think what is different today is razor and blade could be in completely different industries. Movies and shoes. The other side is connecting customers. We are in a network economy. That’s why there is only one Facebook, or one WhatsApp. If you are the only person on Facebook, what’s the value of Facebook? Not much, unless you love yourself. As more and more people get onto Facebook, the value of Facebook increases. It’s not about improving product. Without changing product, Facebook value increases. I think in this connected world that we live in, it’s about connecting products and connecting consumers.

BRIAN KENNY: We’ve got a lot of listeners out there. Many of whom are probably leading firms of one kind or another. How do they even go about exploring redefining their business?

SUNIL GUPTA: I think again, you need to think about what is your key asset? Everything starts with the consumer. In the Amazon case, you move with the consumer to some extent. I asked the same of a company for a medical device manufacturer. I said, “Who’s your competition?” The typical answer is: the other medical devices. Medical business is now becoming a lot about data. Google is getting into that. Apple. iPhone is becoming a medical device. Suddenly you have a very different kind of player getting into this thing. When I say, “What business are you in?” You need to think about who might actually get into that business and that changes the whole picture.

BRIAN KENNY: Why is Amazon so good at engaging customers?

SUNIL GUPTA: I think it comes from the culture of being customer obsessed, that no matter what the customer is right. They deliver on that promise. I mean, the level of convenience that customers expect from companies has changed. It used to be, if a company delivers a product within a week, that was considered good. Now, if you don’t deliver on the same day it just seems awful. They’ve raised the bar in everything. Of course, they’re using technology very effectively, whether it’s in their warehousing, whether now they’re investing in drones. I think they’re still a 25-year-old startup.

BRIAN KENNY: That’s another point that I wanted to touch upon. They’re able to adapt their supply chain it seems almost effortlessly to whatever business direction they move in. Is it possible for another entry to come into this space and scale in the same way that Amazon has? Is this a once-in-a-lifetime type thing?

SUNIL GUPTA: That’s a tough question. I think Amazon, it’s not that they’re adapting supply chain for everything, right? For example, I don’t think Amazon supply chain is ready for delivering frozen food yet. If I have a supply chain to ship you electronics, I can use the same supply chain to ship you prescription medication. That opens up another billion dollar, several billion dollar market. If I call myself an online retailer, I will never think of prescription drug delivery. If I think of my capabilities, I have the warehouse to deliver electronics and books. Why can’t I deliver your prescription medication? That opens up completely different businesses.

BRIAN KENNY: What are the kind of pitfalls that you need to be careful of, as you start to move into adjacent markets?

SUNIL GUPTA: I think definitely the big challenge is: how far do you go? On one hand it’s good to expand the business scope because the industry boundaries are getting blurred. The danger is do you lose focus? The classic challenge of losing focus. There’s a balance. I think in Amazon’s case, if you notice, everything is very tightly connected. If you remove one part, the whole becomes less. That’s the key question: are the pieces fitting together nicely, or they just happen to be another business because it’s profitable?

BRIAN KENNY: We’ve done a couple of cases on Cold Call that touch on the organizational impact of firms that move into new businesses. Some of them are examples of where it’s benefitted the employees. In other cases, it seems to have disrupted the culture in negative ways. How do you see this playing out at Amazon? Does it impact them in any way?

SUNIL GUPTA: If you look at Amazon, it has grown the top line 20, 25% every quarter without fail, except for one quarter in 2001. Right now, it’s in 2019, their sales are 232 billion. I don’t know that many companies, which grow at that rate, even when they’re over 200 billion. I think, if you’re on a winning team, that as an employee, it has to energize you. If you are in a culture which encourages experimentation and innovation, it has to excite you. At the same time, I’m sure it’s a very demanding culture, and there have been reports about how demanding the culture of Amazon is. It probably is not for everybody. For the people who are innovative, who are entrepreneurial, who want to be on a winning team, I’m sure it’s an exciting place.

BRIAN KENNY: There are sort of shades of Apple there. I mean, I think Apple had the same reputation. You’ve discussed this case in class with students.

SUNIL GUPTA: Oh, many students.

BRIAN KENNY: What are sort of the top line things that surprise you as you discuss it?

SUNIL GUPTA: The nice thing about this case is, everybody knows Amazon as a consumer. Everybody has shopped at Amazon. It’s very easy case. In fact, it’s a very short case that I give, at the opening of most sessions. People see it as very surface level. They sort of don’t realize the deep insights that comes out. As a three page case, you sort of say, I will be done in ten minutes, but then you peel the layers of the onion. That was a shocking thing to them, as to how you peel the layers of the onion and how you see the connection across different things. Why did Amazon buy Whole Foods? It makes no sense. Why did they get into AWS? It makes no sense. When you start un-peeling that layer, you see the connection as to why Amazon is doing all these different things. I think that’s the “A-ha” moment that comes across.

BRIAN KENNY: Much more on that in your book. How’s the book doing?

SUNIL GUPTA: Book is doing great.

BRIAN KENNY: Great.

SUNIL GUPTA: Fabulous. It was released in August. I’ve been going around on tour for many, different parts of the world.

BRIAN KENNY: I bet you can buy it on Amazon.

SUNIL GUPTA: You can certainly buy it on Amazon.

BRIAN KENNY: That’s great. Sunil, thanks for joining us today.

SUNIL GUPTA: Thank you very much Brian.

HANNAH BATES: That was Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta – in conversation with Brian Kenny on Cold Call . If you liked this episode and want to hear more of Harvard Business School’s legendary case studies in podcast form – search for Cold Call wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about business strategy from the Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you’re there, be sure to leave us a review. We’re a production of the Harvard Business Review – if you want more articles, case studies, books, and videos like this, be sure to subscribe to HBR at HBR.org. This episode was produced by Anne Saini, Ian Fox, and me, Hannah Bates. Special thanks to Maureen Hoch, Adi Ignatius, Karen Player, Ramsey Khabbaz, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.

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The Integration of Digital Business Models: The Amazon Case Study

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• Carlo Bagnoli 10 ,
• Andrea Albarelli 11 ,
• Stefano Biazzo   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3373-2964 12 ,
• Gianluca Biotto 13 ,
• Giuseppe Roberto Marseglia 14 ,
• Maurizio Massaro   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6461-2709 15 ,
• Matilde Messina 13 ,
• Antonella Muraro 16 &
• Luca Troiano 17  

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The final chapter involves the description of the Amazon case study. The intention is to reconnect the various categorizations illustrated in the previous chapter to a real-world example for the purpose of presenting a successful case of business disruption as Amazon is known to have disrupted retail. The analysis aims at highlighting the fact that Amazon combines all the business model frameworks described in the preceding chapters as well as investigating their coexistence within a single organization.

The present chapter also explains a few methodologies which have been developed in order to guide companies through the process of disrupting their existing business models and facilitating the shift towards an innovative framework. Digital technologies can ease the above-mentioned transition as firms are required to select the technological advancements enabling them to accomplish particular organizational goals.

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Carlo Bagnoli

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Andrea Albarelli

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Bagnoli, C. et al. (2022). The Integration of Digital Business Models: The Amazon Case Study. In: Digital Business Models for Industry 4.0. Future of Business and Finance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97284-4_4

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The case is set in November 2019, and the protagonist is Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. From humble beginnings as an online book retailer, Jeff Bezos has built Amazon into one of the most…

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The case is set in November 2019, and the protagonist is Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com . From humble beginnings as an online book retailer, Jeff Bezos has built Amazon into one of the most valuable companies globally with a market cap of some $900 billion in 2019. Amazon has continued to diversify by integrating online and brick-and-mortar retail, hardware and software, products and services, and as well as original content creation and delivery via online streaming. Amazon Prime delivers content to over 100 million subscribers in the U.S. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the largest provider of cloud computing services, with $35 billion in sales and a 26 percent profit margin. Amazon's microtargeted online advertising services are growing rapidly. Yet, Amazon's retail business continues to display low profitability with thin margins of two percent, following years of losses. Amazon's overwhelming dominance in online commerce as a direct participant and as a provider of backend services to other firms is leading to calls for it to be broken up or to be regulated as a utility. Other strategic issues Jeff Bezos must address include continued diversification and international competition. Amazon's hard-charging workplace culture is also discussed.

Learning Objectives

Strategic Leadership; Stakeholder Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Business Models; External Analysis and Competition; Internal Analysis and Core Competencies; Platform Strategy; Industry Convergence; Technology Strategy and Innovation; Digital Transformation; Corporate Strategy (Diversification and Vertical Integration); Strategy Implementation

Dec 16, 2019

Discipline:

Geographies:

United States

Industries:

E-commerce industry, Media, entertainment, and professional sports, Retail and consumer goods

McGraw-Hill Education

MH0068-PDF-ENG

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Roger Swannell

Case study on Amazon’s approach to innovation and competition in the knowledge economy

Roger on 13/03/2020

Introduction

Amazon is generally regarded as one of the most innovative companies in the world (Reed, 2017). In considering how Amazon approaches innovation within the knowledge economy we’ll frame the analysis of new technologies by looking at McKinsey’s research on disruptive technologies that have potential for economic impact, how Amazon has approached innovation in each of these new technologies, and consider how innovation has impacted Amazon’s revenue growth.

Amazon’s approach to innovation

Since beginning in 1995 as an online bookstore Amazon has expanded into ecommerce marketplace, digital advertising, cloud computing, groceries and apparel, and artificial intelligence industries. Amazon’s investment strategy for innovation is to act like a growth investor, spreading it’s investments across a diverse range of sectors and industries. This is a markedly different strategy to other tech giants who choose to focus the majority of their innovation efforts within their core competencies e.g. Facebook with social networks and Apple with consumer electronic devices (Bowman, 2017).

Jeff Bezo, CEO of Amazon, explains, “Because of our emphasis on the long-term, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies… We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations” (Bezos, 1997). It is through this approach to innovation that Amazon seeks to develop monopolies in all of the sectors that it enters.

McKinsey Global Institute’s report (Fig. 1) on disruptive technologies identifies “12 technologies that could drive truly massive economic transformations and disruptions in the coming years” (Manyika et al, 2013). Amazon is publicly investing in at least eight of the twelve technologies, through investing in companies that are working on new technologies, utilising the new technology to build organisational capacity and improve productivity, and through commercialising the new technologies in ways that enable Amazon’s business customers to implement within their companies.

Amazon is known for its secrecy around innovation, necessarily so in order to protect its trade secrets, but by looking at how Amazon approaches the six most impactful disruptive technologies we can gain an understanding of how Amazon approaches innovation.

Mobile Internet

“Increasingly inexpensive and capable mobile computing devices and Internet connectivity”

Amazon’s Kindle eReader, which launched in 2007, wasn’t the first eReader on the market but with it’s innovative WiFi hardware and Kindle Direct Publishing, the self-publishing platform, it enabled customers to have thousands of books available within seconds and authors to publish their writing without relying on the publishing industry (Fox Rubin, 2017). Whilst the design of the device was very similar to other eReaders, it was Amazon’s move to create its own ebook format and the Kindle Direct Publishing Network to allow ebooks to be published in its own format that fits with Amazon’s approach to innovation.

Whilst the majority of manufacturers were focused on developing eReader devices that could support .epub as the main format for ebooks, Amazon was instead establishing a core competency around its own format and publishing network. Developing the device was a complementary competency for Amazon, although one important enough for Amazon to ensure it controlled the device as part of the value chain for ebooks.

The digitization of books was a technological breakthrough which following Anderson and Tuishman’s evolutionary model of technological change, resulted in lots of technical variation in the formats available. Over the first decade the variations in formats reduced until the current situation of having two formats, epub and Amazon KIndle format, available. The ebook market hasn’t yet arrived at a single dominant design (Anderson & Tushman, 1990. Suárez & Utterback, 1995) however as Amazon currently dominates the eReader market with 60% of worldwide device sales in 2017 (Fox Rubin, 2017), only time will tell if the Amazon format for ebooks becomes the dominant design.

Automation of knowledge work

“Intelligent software systems that can perform knowledge-work tasks”

In 2018 Amazon “reorganised around Artificial Intelligence” (Morgan, 2018). This reorganisation focused other teams and departments at Amazon to utilise AI in their products and services, including warehouse management, recommendations on Amazon Music, Prime Video and on the ecommerce marketplace, Alexa and the Amazon Go store (Levy, 2018). This demonstrates Amazon’s approach to automating knowledge work. AI isn’t considered a single product that remains within a single team, it is a technology and capability that Amazon clearly regards as a core competency that should be utilised in as many ways as possible in order to give Amazon a competitive advantage in all of the sectors it operates in.

This is an example of what Tushman and Anderson explain when they say, “Technological innovation affects not only a given population, but also those populations within technologically interdependent communities” (Tushman & Anderson, 1986). Amazon leveraged the technological innovation of AI to gain benefits across all areas of its business, however it remains unclear whether this new technology was a competence-destroying because it required completely different skills and knowledge to operate or competence-enhancing because it built “on existing know how yet did not render skills obsolete” (Tushman and Anderson 1986).

Having realised the benefits Amazon went on to commercialise it’s AI by creating AutoGluon, a service that enables developers to build applications involving machine learning on top of AWS (Hepburn, 2020). “Commercial AI has enjoyed what we at Amazon call the flywheel effect: customer interactions with AI systems generate data; with more data, machine learning algorithms perform better, which leads to better customer experiences; better customer experiences drive more usage and engagement, which in turn generate more data.” (Sarikaya, 2019).

Internet of Things

“Networks of low-cost sensors and actuators for data collection, monitoring, decision making, and process optimisation”

The Amazon Dash, an internet-enabled button for making repeat purchases, was Amazon’s move into Internet of Things devices. On sale for less than four years the device fell foul of consumer protection laws in Germany, Amazon’s second biggest market at the time, where a court ruled that Amazon Dash didn’t provide customers with enough information to make informed purchases (Jagannathan, 2019). Although a regulatory and revenue-generating failure, the device may have been more of a success in establishing Amazon’s first-mover advantage into the market of consumer IoT devices and in collecting data on buying behaviour (Newman, 2016) to inform the next generation of devices.

Echo and Dot, the home speakers with the Alexa voice technology, soon replaced the Dash as a means of making purchases easier for consumers and as a means of collecting data on buying behaviour, data which could also be used to train the machine learning algorithms that powered Alexa. Voice-powered machine learning algorithms are intangible assets that require investment but have different economic characteristics to tangible assets (Haskell & Westlake, 2017):

• Sunk costs – represent an investment that is unlikely to deliver a return in the way a tangible asset would if resold as intangible assets are difficult to sell as they are often bespoke to the company developing them, as in the case of Alexa algorithms.
• Spillovers – are benefits competitors may gain from appropriating intangible assets such as the design of a device which is easy to reverse engineer. Amazon’s defense is to focus more on things that are difficult to copy such as bespoke algorithms.
• Scalability – a characteristic of an intangible asset that can be leveraged in ways that tangible assets cannot without increased investment, such as the Alexa algorithm which works on all Alexa powered devices, but also the ‘brand’ of Alexa as a likeable, humanised, ‘part of the family’ voice assistant in comparison to Google choice to call its voice assistant Google.
• Synergies – occur when intangible assets become more valuable together than in isolation. Alexa has more value because it connects to Amazon’s ecommerce systems and allows customers to make purchases, and because Amazon allows developers to build other services on top of the Amazon ecosystem that enables customers to control the heating and lighting in their homes.

Amazon’s approach to investing more in its intangible assets, such as algorithms, than in the physical devices seems to suggest that they recognise the competitive advantage intangible assets can give them a over other companies, but also that they recognise the risks Haskell and Westlake point out can be associated with this kind of investment (Haskell & Westlake, 2017). The economic value of intangible assets in the case of Alexa comes from strategic choices about how they are leveraged to drive purchasing behaviour in customers.

“Use of computer hardware and software resources to deliver services of the Internet ”

Amazon Web Services is a leading (Gartner, 2018) infrastructure-as-a-service provider. Gartner calls out AWS’ “prioritisation of being first to market” along with being the “most mature enterprise-ready provider, with the strongest track record of customer success” as key aspects of being a leading cloud provider (Bala, et al, 2018). AWS started from the needs of Amazon’s ecommerce business, which required reliable, scalable technology to power its growth in the early 2000’s. By 2003, providing infrastructure services and reliable, scalable data-centers was considered a core competency by Bezos and Amazon senior executives. When Amazon launched AWS in 2006 they were “first to market with a modern cloud infrastructure” (Miller, 2016). AWS holds 40% of the market share in cloud computing (Carey, 2019), a position it gained by building on core competencies it owned in other areas of its business and being years ahead of competitors (Miller, 2016).

Teece talks about the ‘perplexing’ problem of how many companies who are first to market with an innovation are not the ones to commercialise and profit from it. With AWS, Amazon demonstrated that it’s approach to innovation can deliver on significant commercial success. Teece’s framework for determining which company will win from introducing innovation involves understanding the appropriability; the environmental factors that affect the ability to capture profits from an innovation, the design phase; whether a dominant design has emerged, and the competencies necessary for the commercialisation of the innovation.

In the early 2000s, cloud infrastructure services had what Teece describes as a “tight appropriability regime” (Teece, 1986). The environments in which the technology for providing infrastructure services over the internet existed was easy to protect simply because competitors were not yet building their core competencies in cloud. Having a “tight appropriability regime” for cloud services gave AWS the time it needed to launch its products and services before the regime weakened and other entrants could imitate the technology.

At the time of launching AWS, cloud infrastructure services were pre-paradigmatic, the majority of infrastructure providers weren’t even considering cloud, so there was no dominant design. Teece says that, “when imitation is possible and occurs coupled with design modification before the emergence of a dominant design, followers have a good chance of having their modified product anointed as the industry standard, often to the great disadvantage of the innovator.” (Teece, 1986), but this did not happen to Amazon.

Amazon already owned the complementary assets required to commercialise AWS successfully (procurement, marketing, sales, etc.) which removed any bargaining power issues that may have arisen from contracting assets, and put AWS in a good position to quickly establish the dominant design for cloud infrastructure services and so leverage its position as a first-to-market pre-paradigmatic innovator and as a paradigmatic market leader.

Advanced robotics

“Increasingly capable robots with enhanced sensors, dexterity, and intelligence; used to automate many tasks”

In 2012, Amazon acquired Kiva Systems, a small robotics company for $775 million providing Amazon with mobile robots and the technical expertise to begin automating its warehouses and sorting facilities. (Del Rey, 2019). This automation of the work of pickers and packers enabled Amazon to increase efficiency in its warehouse operations by reducing the time taken to pick items for delivery to its customers (Simon, 2019), and so driving the success of its ecommerce business. In 2019 Amazon introduced machines to automate putting customer orders into boxes ready for delivery, a job that was previously performed by thousands of workers. It “would amount to more than 1,300 cuts across 55 U.S. fulfillment centers for standard-sized inventory. Amazon would expect to recover the costs in under two years, at $1 million per machine plus operational expenses.”, reported Reuters (Dastin, 2019). Amazon currently has more than 200,000 mobile robots working inside its warehouse network, alongside hundreds of thousands of human workers.

Amazon, as a low margin business, seeks to organise its supply chain more effectively than its competitors to maximise profits (Teece, 1986). Automation increasingly allows for this in Amazon’s fulfilment business as it replaces the routine work (Autor, Levy & Murnane, 2003) of pickers and packers. In making capital investments in technologies to replace workers with robots Amazon could be said to be taking a skills-biased approach; that is, that it favours more highly skilled workers such as programmers, engineers and mechanics at the cost of lower skilled workers and assumes thats increased productivity for the company comes from fewer highly skilled workers over more lower skilled workers. Ordinarily we would expect that companies would make decisions about how much to invest in automation technologies by considering economic factors such as the cost of labour in a particular geographic market however, from what we’ve seen of Amazon’s investment strategy in innovation it seems more likely that Amazon is playing the long game with automation and betting on machines being capable of performing non-routine cognitive and manual tasks in the future (Frey & Osborne 2013) and so replacing lower skilled workers completely.

The adoption of automation in warehouses and fulfilment centres has been congruent with Amazon’s approach to innovation involving massive investment in technology that provides increased internal capabilities enabling Amazon to become a market leader and then selling that capability to businesses to deliver long term revenue gains. The question of whether robots will replace workers, at least in Amazon warehouses, seems to have an inevitable answer.

Autonomous or near-autonomous vehicles

“Vehicles that can navigate and operate autonomously or semi autonomously in many situations”

Amazon has invested $700 million in Rivian, the electric vehicle manufacturer and $530 million in Aurora, an autonomous driving startup. “For Amazon, this small investment is a good way to enlarge their bet on the E.V. [electric vehicle] market without having to tool up a plant to find out if it will fly. Over time, the Rivian investment could give Amazon a starting point to own and operate an in-house package delivery business.” (Mitchell, 2019).

Amazon has been developing delivery drones “that can fly up to 15 miles and deliver packages under five pounds to customers in less than 30 minutes.” (Vincent, 2019). Developing delivery drones and getting FAA approval might be considered a big enough innovation for most companies, but Amazon goes a huge step further by developing its own Air Traffic Control System for drones. “The system also gives aviation authorities, like the FAA, the ability to track the drones in the airspace to ensure safety and create “no fly zones” in times of emergency. The traffic management system is easy to use for various operators in the same airspace because it will connect via the internet” (Amazon, 2019). In a similar strategic play to the Kindle, Amazon realises that controlling the platform that controls the devices creates considerable more competitive advantage than simply developing the best drones.

Developing drones and autonomous electric vehicles will reduce Amazon’s reliance on third-party delivery partners and own the supply chain (Prosser, 2019), and conceivably it could commercialise the service to compete with FedEx, UPS, etc., and thus drive increased revenue for the company, but in order to do so it needs to protect the design of the drones and vehicles from competitors. Archibugi & Pianta explain that, “technological change impinges on codified and tacit knowledge… innovations can either be embodied in capital goods and products or disembodied, i.e. the know-how included in patents” (Archibugi & Pianta, 1996). As it is almost impossible to protect designs for publicly available machines like drones through trade secrets in the way Amazon does for its software and algorithms, Amazon needs to file patents to protect its disembodied codified knowledge in order to continue to be innovative.

In 2019 Amazon filed over two thousand patents (Capriel, 2019) many for drones and autonomous vehicles, and since 2010 Amazon has grown its patent portfolio from less than 1,000 active patents in 2010 to nearly 10,000 in 2019 (Columbus, 2019), a ten-fold increase in less than a decade (Fig. 2).

Patents can be used strategically by companies in a number of ways; to protect inventions with the intention of commercialising them, or simply to prevent competitors from entering the space. This makes the number of patents filed a poor indicator of innovation, and so it seems that the number of patents Amazon has filed has increased over time because they have become involved in more sectors and industries rather than because they have become more innovative.

Amazon’s sources of competitive advantage

These six examples demonstrate Amazon’s superior ability over its competitors and how they employ the same approach towards innovation; not constrained to sectors or industries that they have previously operated in, investing huge amounts to own the sector they move into, building core competencies in their value chain to protect their own competitiveness, and making new technologies available outside their own ecosystem to allow their customers to leverage the technology in ways that support and scale Amazon’s business model, in many cases the customer becoming reliant on Amazon in their value chain, for example Netflix using AWS (Uenlue, 2018).

Amazon’s economic growth from innovation

Amazon’s approach to innovating across multiple sectors and industries has given them significant competitive advantage and commercial success, growing from $6.92 billion in 2004 to $280.52 bn in 2019 (Clement, 2020), an almost 4000% increase.

The breakdown of Amazon’s commercial performance by it’s main areas of business in 2018 shows it’s longstanding ecommerce business as the main revenue producing business (Day & Gu, 2019):

• Ecommerce: $234.61 bn sales
• Cloud computing: $25.6 bn in revenue
• Groceries: $25.4 bn in sales
• Online apparel: $24.61 bn in sales
• Consumables: $23.6 bn in sales
• Digital advertising: $7.4 bn in revenue

Of the six disruptive innovations discussed above, only cloud computing, where Amazon is the market leader, generates significant income. This reflects Amazon’s approach to innovation involving long-term investment to establish commercial success.

Amazon has earned its reputation as one of the most innovative companies in the world. Amazon’s approach innovation can be broadly summed up in three parts:

• Large investments and acquisitions in software and hardware startups spread across multiple sectors and industries. This puts Amazon in control of the value chain and reduces the risk of suppliers holding strong bargaining positions.
• Use the technology that is produced to develop efficiency and productivity gains in products and services in a diverse range of sectors and ensure competitive advantage over the long term.
• Commercialise those products and services, allowing other companies to leverage them, generating revenue and creating lock-in network effects (Katz & Shapiro, 1994) for those companies and Amazon’s customers.

This approach to innovation has enabled Amazon to develop significantly successful businesses in ecommerce, cloud computing, digital advertising and retail, and is likely to contribute to Amazon’s continued success into the future.

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This repository contains an in-depth analysis of Amazon Sales Data using SQL 🚚📦.Whether you’re a data analyst, business strategist, or SQL enthusiast, this analysis offers a comprehensive look at e-commerce dynamics through the lens of Amazon’s vast sales data. Feel free to explore the queries and contribute to enhancing the analysis! 📊🚀

Vaibhav-Xo/Amazon-Sales-Case-Study-And-Dashboard

Folders and files, repository files navigation, amazon-sales-data-case-study-using-sql-and-dashboard.

Note: Check out the .pdf and .pbix files to get clear view of the project ☺️

Dashboard using powerbi:.

Objective Of The Project

The main aim of the project is to dive into the Amazon Sales Data and draw insights from it and analayze which factors affect the sales of different cities and their corrosponding branches using SQL. The project aims to uncover insights into sales trends, customer behavior, and product performance. By leveraging the power of SQL queries, we extract meaningful statistics and patterns from complex datasets.

Overview Of The Dataset

The dataset consist sales record for three cities of Myanmar which are Naypyitaw, Yangon and Mandalay and their respective branches A, B & C. The sales took place in the first quarter of year 2019. The dataset consist of 1000 records and 17 fields like (Invoice Id, Branch, City, Customer Type, Gender, Product Line, Unit Price, Quantity, VAT, Total, Date, Time, Payment Method, Cogs, Gross Margin Percentage, Gross Income, Rating).

Steps Performed On Dataset

• 1] Data Wrangling
• 2] Feature Engineering
• 3] Exploratory Data Analysis

Analysis Performed On Dataset

• 1]Sales Analysis
• 2]Product Analysis
• 3]Customer Analysis

Questions Answered

• What is the count of distinct product lines in dataset?
• Which payment method occours most frequently?
• Which product line has highest sales?
• How much revenue is generated each month?
• Which product line generated highest revenue?
• Which city has highest revenue record?
• Which product line incurred highest VAT?
• Which customer type occours most frequently?
• Which branch exceeded average number of product sold?
• Which product line is most frequently associated with each gender?
• Identifying cusstomer type contributing highest revenue?

And many more....

For more such intresting projects do check out my other repositeries....keep learning...keep growing...piece✌️

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Exploring the focus that Amazon inc. has on innovation as a business strategy, setting clarity around the company's present situation with the use of an in-depth PESTLE analysis to set the scene.

A company such as Amazon has a dedication to innovation using it as a tool to realize the growth of current markets, while strategically positioning itself in future markets. This case study will analyze Amazon's current situation using the PESTLE form of analysis, briefly linking the outcomes with innovations that have been released by the company to date. By Isolde Kanikani Date: 15-07-2021

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