Originally published in The Street
By Andy Schroepfer
Much has been made about VCR rewinders and airplane seat-belt extenders. Amazon‘s (AMZN – Get Report) Prime Day created buzz but the product selection was puzzling to many.
The twits on Twitter (TWTR – Get Report) are fooling themselves, however, if they think Amazon’s heavily hyped Prime Day holiday on July 15, which marked the seminal online store’s 20th anniversary, was the #EPICfail many of them claimed.
Just like Amazon baffles critics by being a multi-billion dollar mega-brand that regularly makes almost no quarterly profit (but sells in astronomical volume), the Seattle-based company’s Prime Day promotion was a head-scratcher. Was it simply garage sale, a new category of sale, or a flawed idea, like the Amazon Fire Phone.
But Prime Day was designed, mostly, to do one thing: get people talking and, yeah, maybe clear out some old inventory, too. (Velveeta, anyone?) By that measure, it succeeded wildly; it renewed its reputation as #EPICicon of American commerce.
Look, everyone is writing about it, you are clicking on it, people are tweeting about it. In a Kardashian era where you get famous by getting clicks and shares, this all makes perfect sense.
And it did get clicks. Data from Dynatrace, for instance, found the TryPrime page returning 503 errors and checkout page load times at four-to-five times normal levels. That suggests there was a lot of commercial activity on the site, as well as people overwhelming the system to become Prime members.
It also pulled off a profound marketing feat, creating a once-a-year, calendar-marking national shopping day, a Black Friday in the slow summer shipping season, an event that attracts anticipation, excitement (and, yes, lots of easy, snarky jokes). Jeff Bezos is laughing his trademark laugh all the way to the bank.
The company did this in brilliant fashion, too, by making the celebration something that its global customer base can share, inventing a holiday not tied to any religion or politics. Even more, Amazon named it something that reinforces its key subscription service.
Note, too, that if imitation really is the most sincere form of flattery, well, Wal-Mart(WMT – Get Report) is trying to create its own shopping event to match Prime Day. (And if you think Prime Day was funny, imagine the wave of wit a regular competing Wal-Mart Day will spark among jokesters.)
Why hasn’t Target (TGT – Get Report) created its own unique shopping day? Several blogs reference “Target Tuesday,” which could be a really ambitious attempt to “own” an entire day of the week. Followed, perhaps, by Wal-Mart Wednesday. And then Sears (SHLD – Get Report) Saturday! Heck, Amazon could have pursued “Amazon A.M.” to “own” half of every day.
Personally, some at the 400-person company I work for were so impressed by Amazon’s moxie, that they even nicknamed our lunch hour #PrimeHour, so employees didn’t need to sneak around to look at the potential deals. We are tech industry people — we love random products. We even did a little video about it (cheap boxes of Pop Tarts were hot at that time of the day, I was told).
Amazon, as it should, is claiming record success on many fronts, in spite of the negative posts on social media, which, actually, weighed in on the positive side at 2-to-1.
So, at the risk of drawing smirks from all the cool kids on Twitter, Happy birthday, Amazon! Since Prime Day 2016 falls on a Friday, I’ll be celebrating #PrimeHour once again at lunch with my colleagues, or maybe the company will make it a long weekend shopping holiday.
What’s so funny about VCR rewinders, anyway? Sounds like a fairly practical thing to have around the house to me.
Andrew Schroepfer is chief strategy officer at Hosting, a Denver-based managed-cloud services firm.