Leveraging Independence Week Of India – Marketing Opportunity For Amazon India

Marketing Opportunity for Amazon India

Discuss about the Breaking the chains of organizational structure.

For the purpose of the task, the company chosen is Amazon India.

Marketing Opportunity- India is one of the largest growing markets for Amazon, despite facing tough competition from Indian players like Flipkart, Snapdeal & Shopclues; Amazon has set a mark for itself amongst its consumer base (Kalia, 2015)

The figure above shows the revenue at the end of financial year 2016-17. The losses for Amazon are much greater in comparison to Flipkart; this is primarily owing to the cash burn of Amazon towards its marketing opportunity. The company wants to leverage the 68th Independence Day of India to further increase the penetration and brand awareness in the Tier 2 market of India.

Marketing Idea- The idea is to leverage 15^th Of August, which is the Independence Day of India. The company wants to create a “Big Billion week”. In the entire week the company wants to offer maximum discount to the Indian population. India is a price sensitive market and thus it makes sense to offer products at a subsidized price. The company will benefit from the Billion week in the following ways:

• Increased brand awareness
• Increased penetration in the Tier 2 market.
• Traffic on the website
• Addition in its existing customer base
• Launch of the Amazon Alex in the Indian market
• Increase in the revenue

India is an open market which has a very minimum government intervention in the business policies for foreign countries, although the company has to comply with the CCI (Competition commission of India).  The competition Act, 2002 strictly follows the philosophy of modern competition laws. The act prohibits anti-competitive agreements, abuse of dominant position by enterprises and regulates combinations, which causes or likely to cause an appreciable adverse effect on competition within India.

The idea to leverage the marketing opportunity is extremely feasible, the entire board and the stakeholders are convinced with the idea of leveraging the 15^th August week. The idea here is to capture the entire offline and online viewership in India, so much so as to create a situation of marketing mayhem by Amazon. The company has following elements in mind to infuse with the idea of leveraging the marketing opportunity:

• 2 months in advance running of online campaign on the entire social media and online channels
• 1 month in advance running of offline campaigns in daily newspapers, lifestyle, home décor, entertainment and sports magazines.
• Hiring of Billboards at prominent locations in Tier 2 cities of India.
• Running a nationwide road campaign on Amazon’s Big Billion week campaign.

Flipkart, Snapdeal and Shopclues are major competitors of Amazon in India, Paytm (Backed by Alibaba Group) is also expanding its customer base in India, with so many strong players to compete with, and a number of issues can spoil the day for Amazon:

• Holiday season sale by these players
• Shopclues already has a good penetration In Tier 2 market, it can create trouble for Amazon
• Flipkart is backed by Strong investors, being an India company it can easily leverage the sentiments of Indians to buy from Flipkart rather than Amazon(Roy & Charaborti, 2017)

Although, the idea is to execute the campaign, which will be executed at all cost, the issue can be with the penetration and the desired results.

As it can be seen from the diagram above, Amazon follows a multidivisional organizational structure. The salient features of the structure are:

• Global Function based groups- It comprise of Office of the CEO,Business development, Amazon web services, Finance, International consumer business, Accounting, consumer business and legal.
• Global Hierarchy-Hierarchy is one of the most fundamental features of organizational structure. In case of Amazon, this is expressed in terms of global system of vertical lines of command and authority which influence the online retail firm. The objective of the structure is to facilitate managerial control of Amazon’s entire organization(Bolman & Deal, 2017)
• Geographic Division-Amazon has divided its organizational structure into three main divisions, Amazon International, North America and Amazon web services(Dukes & Zhu,2017)

Amazon is the leading e-commerce companies in the world. The company’s product offering include:

• Consumer durable
• Consumer electronics
• Home décor
• Grocery
• Lifestyle Products
• Technology Products
• Cloud services
• E-Books
• Kindle
• Kids & Toys
• Automotive and Industrial
• Amazon Prime

Amazon has a listing of Millions of products on its website and it keeps on bringing new curated deals for its customers. It can be easily said that the company sells literally everything which a consumer might require for his daily and special needs (Mishra & Kotkar, 2015)

Amazon is a customer centric company which focuses on making lives of its consumers easy by designing processes and policies which will benefit them the most. Based on the ideology, the strategic objectives of the company can be defined as:

• Be number 1 customer centric company
• Use technology and innovation collectively to solve customer problems.
• Launch of exclusive retail store for its customers
• Increase the brand awareness by 2X
• Expansion into developing countries
• Create a sustainable revenue base in the Chinese market.

Marketing Idea – “Big Billion Week”

The marketing objectives for the company are:

• Increased conversation and engagement on the social media platforms
• Increased brand awareness amongst the online and offline target audience.
• Create a market for Hi-end technology goods
• Increase the social mention, likes, fan, followers on social by a factor of 2.5X in a duration of 6 months

Amazon was founded in the year 1994 by Jeff Bezos, since then the company has been climbing uphill with its sales figures and brand recognition. In developed markets like the USA, Amazon is the market leader, however in developing nation like India, the company is still struggling in competing against the Indian players, some of the options which can do wonders for Amazon are:

• Strategic Alliance- Get into an alliance with logistic companies to give strength to its shipment and delivery.
• Take over- The Company has deep pockets, thus Amazon is in a position to gain market dominance by taking over smaller e-commerce companies. This will help the company in killing the growing competition and gather an existing customer base.

Legal- To ensure legality of the marketing projects the company has to comply with the legislation of the country in which Amazon is trading its products or services. For example in India market the company has to comply with Completion commission of India act 2002.

Ethical- Amazon has been following high ethical standards since its inception, the company follows transparency in all its business proceeding and is consistently working towards environmental sustainability. At Amazon, people are hired with high ethical and integrity standards

Achievable- All the marketing objectives are set in accordance with the SMART framework and are achievable, provided the strategies set to achieve them are followed with due diligence and monitored round the clock.

The legislation requirements which can impact the business model of Amazon are:

• Taxes
• Payment Gateways
• Trademark, patent and copyrights
• Shipping restrictions
• Inventory
• Age restrictions
• Business Insurance
• Licences and permits
• PCI Compliance

The feedback of the stakeholders to the existing marketing plan for Promotion of Amazon can be summarized in the following Points:

• Digital Spend-The management was of the opinion that India is one of the fastest growing market in terms of online spend and the company does not want to lose up on any opportunity which can be generated by the online channels. Hence, the budget for online spent to be increased to 30 Cr from earlier set budget of 15 Cr
• Offline Spend- Marketing team threw an amazing insight on the offline viewership and the target audience of Amazon. According to the study of marketing team, Amazon’s audience comprise mainly of millennial and thus spending too much on offline channels is a waste of resources. Hence the budget was shrined from earlier 25 Cr to 15 Cr for offline promotions.
• Road Show-Management thought road show was an interesting idea to execute in the Tier 2 market; however they have asked to find a celebrity akin to the city of promotion.
• Influencer Marketing On twitter- Management really liked the concept of influencer marketing and in a market like India, where entertainment and sports dominate the audience, it makes great sense to have influencers from these sections of the society to make the people aware of the Amazon Big billion week. The celebrity to be used for the campaign is: Ranveer Singh, PV Sindhu and Tanmay Bhat of AIB fame.

Conclusion

Marketing plan for a company can be seen as the roadmap towards the fulfilment of the company’s marketing objectives. The marketing opportunity in this case is to leverage the Independence week of India; 13-19^th August 2018. During this period Amazon wants to increase the brand awareness and market penetration in the Tier 2 cities of India. The company for this purpose is going with a full-fledged strategy to capture both the offline and online media vehicle to woo its target audience. For the very first time, Amazon is also planning a road show in tier 2 cities with a local celebrity to further penetrate the market. Thus it can be said with utmost surety that Amazon will be able to achieve the numbers it is aiming for by end of the August month.

References

Ashkenas, R., Ulrich, D., Jick, T. and Kerr, S., 2015. The boundaryless organization: Breaking the chains of organizational structure. John Wiley & Sons.

Bolman, L.G. and Deal, T.E., 2017. Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership. John Wiley & Sons.

Dukes, A.J. and Zhu, Y., 2017. Why Customer Service Frustrates Consumers: Using a Tiered Organizational Structure to Exploit Hassle Costs.

Kalia, P., 2015. Top e-Retailers of India: business model and components. International Journal of Electronic Marketing and Retailing, 6(4), pp.277-298.

Mishra, S.V. and Kotkar, S.N., 2015. A Study on Current Status of E-Commerce in India: A Comparative Analysis of Flipkart and Amazon. International Journal of Advance Research in Computer Science and Management Studies, ISSN, 2327782.

Padhy, P.C. and Mishra, A.K., 2017. E-COMMERCE: PROMOTING ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN INDIA.

Roy, S.K. and Charaborti, R., 2017. Case Study 5: Amazon. in: Surviving in a Jungle. In Services Marketing Cases in Emerging Markets (pp. 45-59). Springer, Cham.

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