In case you missed it, Amazon turned 20 years old recently and celebrated it with a one day sale: Amazon Prime Day.

The one day event was dubbed 'Black Friday in July' and saw huge discounts on products from electronics to homeware for, you guessed it, Amazon Prime members.

Prime Day is the latest in a long line of beautifully simple yet effective initiatives from the US super-retailer. Prime is the cornerstone of Amazon's strategy to win a greater share of wallet in more and more categories, and Amazon's relentless focus on the customer experience has powered their phenomenal growth over these 20 years.

Amazon's obsession with frictionless commerce and personalised experiences are undoubtedly the foundations of its success, and other brands, both pure-play digital and 'clicks and mortar', are currently focussing efforts to try and catch up with Amazon, or at least emulate some of Amazon's customer- and data-driven strategy. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Amongst all this backdrop of businesses falling over themselves to copy Amazon, what interests me is that Amazon is quietly starting to imitate some of the behaviours of the legacy traditional businesses, the market leaders and giants across traditional retail, FMCG and Telco. While some of these business have responded to digital disruption better than others, I am referring to their ability honed over the last 60 years of the communications industry to build brands that create meaning and attachment among their customers, and foster loyalty in an emotional fashion, that is implicit and deep rooted.

Amazon has realised that to drive the kind of impregnable brand strength and loyalty, it needs the brand to deliver for customers on both an emotional level as well as a practical level.

Prime has broadened out from a simple 'all-inclusive delivery for a year' package into an increasingly multi-faceted reward program, including free TV and movies, books and unlimited photo storage. Amazon is now winning over TV and movie fans by getting into making content, commissioning the sort of adventurous shows that TV networks shy away from but that have dedicated and fiercely loyal audiences (earning Emmy nominations along the way).

A new studio in the east end will create editorial to support Amazon's move into fashion and Amazon has sponsored the first ever menswear Fashion Week in New York. And the move into hardware is all about translating the winning formula of frictionless commerce into other areas of your life, even if the hardware itself is yet to match up to the design and build quality of Apple.

All these moves are shifting the dial when we look at Havas Media Group's Meaningful Brands research, which seeks to define brand strength via a new basket of measures. This year Amazon has moved up the rankings to be named the UK's most Meaningful Brand, beating companies like Coca Cola, Nike, P&G, Tesco and Google. Amazon is now beating established brands in emotional or personal benefit scoring areas such as 'gives me enjoyable moments', and 'I like to be seen using this brand', not something that it was doing so well a couple of years ago.

But despite hitting the top spot, there is still one area where Amazon can improve. We are in an era when brands can can do well by doing good, but Amazon still ranks poorly for its contribution to customers' collective wellbeing. Sustainability, environmental and ethical measures are all areas Amazon can improve on, and while the business is making small steps in the area of CSR, judging from our survey UK consumers are still unconvinced, and in particular Amazon's tax affairs are still fresh in the mind.

But work has started in that area, and as Amazon improves its reputation for corporate social responsibility, it will only strengthen its position as a Meaningful Brand. So as an increasing number of established companies are finding themselves in direct competition with Amazon, the challenge they face is: can you learn from Amazon as fast as Amazon can learn from you?

 

By Ed Cox, MD of Forward – part of Havas Media Group UK. 

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