Читать книгу The Amazon Management System - Ram Charan - Страница 29

Despite Amazon’s burgeoning book business, Bezos never forgot his dream of “the everything store.” In 1998, Amazon started its first wave of expansions into new categories such as music, video, and gifts; and into new geographies, such as the UK and Germany. After that, the company accelerated its further expansions into toys, consumer electronics, home improvement, software, video games, and many more. This was the kernel of Bezos’s vision.

While enjoying dramatic organic growth in these earlier categories, Amazon also made numerous investments and acquisitions, such as Drugstore.com, Pets Smart, Accept.com, HomeGrocer.com, Gear.com, Back to Basics Toys, Greenlight.com (online car retailer), Wine Shopper.com, Audible.de, Zappos, and many others.3 Despite the variety, you can discern a common underlying theme.

At a dazzling speed, Amazon had woven together a magnificent tapestry of the everything store.

During this time of rapid growth of categories, geographies, and acquisitions, Bezos kept his laser-sharp focus on the customer. In 2001 he articulated Amazon’s “pillars of customer experiences” for the first time and reinforced the durability of these pillars in his 2008 Shareholder Letter:

1 Selection: already 45,000 items and millions of book titles on sale in 2001.

2 Convenience: a combination of 1-click ordering, recommendations, wish lists, instant order update, “Look Inside the Book” and fast delivery.

3 Low price: not simply by the scale of economy, but more so by the Moore’s Law and its variants (price performance of bandwidth, disk space and processing power are doubling about every 9, 12, and 18 months, respectively).

Why this constant focus on the customers? Because Bezos firmly believes that “our consumer franchise is our most valuable asset.”

Amazon launched Prime in 2005, a $79 annual membership fee for free two-day shipping. As of December 31, 2018, Amazon had more than 100M prime members around the world, the second-highest number of paid subscribers only next to Netflix. 4

Interestingly, the principle of focusing on the customer will result in the best creation of shareholder value.