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Amazon Kindle DX
Amazon’s new microtargeting initiative

This is how microtargeting works and why the best continue to earn great profits. Amazon (AMZN) is that e-commerce company that continually launched and refined until it assumed a position in worldwide retail, not just e-commerce.

Pundits scoffed at the free shipping for $25 offer until data showed that incremental purchases and lifetime value paid for the shipping.  Skeptics scoffed again when the company said it would deliver millions of Harry Potter books on each book’s drop date, but the company made it happen and secured millions of pre-orders.  And even more skeptics derided the notion of Amazon Prime, the $75 fee that provides free two day shipping and low cost 1 day shipping for a $75 annual membership fee.

I’m in my third or fourth year of Amazon Prime membership so I can’t scoff too much at that one. Now here’s the gamble that underscores how a company doing its research can create amazing sales lift. TechCrunch is reporting that Amazon has a 30 day money back guarantee on its Kindle e-book reader with shoppers allowed to keep the Kindle even if they get their money back. Before you go running off to burn Amazon for a free Kindle, the offer is only available to certain customers.  I didn’t get one, and I’ve spent thousands at Amazon over the years.   Smart money says that Amazon is screening demographics, buying characteristics and web analytics for prolific buyers with the goal of getting more Kindles into circulation. Some people will get a free Kindle.  More will buy the Kindle, like it, goose sales of e-books and influence others, maybe even become evangelists.

The lesson is that being rigid about your analytics and metrics allows you to be an aggressive marketplace.  About seven years ago, I created Carfax’s BuyBack Guarantee program.  That was an aggressive program too that essentially promised that the data company would buy any vehicle if a Carfax report had been purchased and a problem title was later found on the vehicle. The marketing team loved it.  The CEO loved it.  The money people, the insurance people, even some of the data people were a wee bit skeptical.  But I had enough data to overcome Board objections, to convince the insurance people and to roll to market.   Our agency even recut our ads to tag the new program at the end of each spot. I just checked their site and the program is still active, just like Amazon’s $25 free shipping program is interwoven into that company’s brand promise. The whole thing starts with data.  If you don’t understand all of your data, you can’t be aggressive and profitable.

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Our conference call to discuss implementation logistics with a brand new client was minutes away.    I closed my office door so I didn’t bother my neighbor and fired up my contact list. My computer seemed to hesitate and then something bad happened. The computer began rebooting.

A printed phone list is your equivalent of belts and suspenders

Remember this was a brand new client whose contact information hadn’t yet made it to my address book and phone.  The computer seemed to take a long time simply to get to a Windows splash screen.  The call was due to begin. What do you do in that case?  Does someone run to an office, find the number on the shared calendar, copy it down (hopefully doing so correctly while in a rush) and dash back?  Do you wait for the computer to finish rebooting and then quickly access your files?  Yes, you should have dialed in at least five minutes early, but you didn’t. What if your network was down?

Here is what I learned. A simple printout once a week of my phone list reduces a lot of hassle.   You don’t need a Rolodex the size of your grandfather’s with yellowing cards, coffee stains and liquid paper corrections from typing the information.  Once a week, whenever you do your essential office housekeeping, print out a telephone list and stash it in your bag.

There have been two recent RIM outages so don’t crow about your Blackberry.  There have also been Gmail outages and any network person will tell you that servers, workstations and laptops will all fail at some point.  But the entire phone system in your city?  Not likely, and anything that causes that widespread an outage is on the news.

After what seemed to be an hour but was in reality a couple of minutes, I was dialing the phone and welcoming the new client to the fold.  Of course, I first had to apologize for dialing into the call after he did, something a printed phone list would have prevented.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shazbot/ / CC BY 2.0
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No tracker in his phone

Sopranos fans may remember Tony getting his hands on a new cell phone and having the GPS function ripped out. You’ll forgive Palm and Windows Mobile execs if they feel like doing the same.

As Google’s Android adds features every week, the convergence between phone and Largest Search Company Ever blurs fast.   Word out of Google now is that phones using Android will change the search results based on the phone’s location to a degree of granularity we never saw with computers. If I type the word “pizza” in a Google session on my computer, I’ll receive results about local pizza restaurants, not necessarily about pizza recipes, pizza stores, frozen pizza or anything other than a ranking that can eventually be monetized or propel the company into a data leadership role no other company can match. Now phones with Google’s Android operating system do the same thing.  Using Google’s Search Suggest feature, the company suggests that

users in the Boston metro area begin typing “Muse”, suggestions such as “museum of science boston” and “museum of fine arts boston” are provided because people near Boston frequently look for these very popular museums

For now, people with Android phones have to opt-in to the service by visiting “Settings” on their search page and checking off  “Allow use of device location”. There is no word from Google on how it will use the convergence of the demographics it collects about you, your real-time physical location from your Google Microchip phone, the search information you’re presented and your subsequent real-time actions including calling someone, texting someone, walking to the museum (and just how long did that take you by which route so we can update Google Maps’ walking directions?). Perhaps Tony Soprano had the right idea after all.