What Amazon’s New Fire Phone Can Teach You About Marketing

Amazon has announced its new Fire Phone which is to be released July 25, 2014.

Amazon Fire Phone
Amazon’s Newly Announced Fire Phone

Jeff Bezos is a savvy marketer and you can see it from how Amazon is positioning its smart phone, the product video and the product page.

The biggest issue with competing in the smartphone space is that it’s very heavily over crowded with intense competition from world-class companies like Apple, Samsung, HTC, Sony — just to mention a few, and they all have great products. This kind of operating environment makes it very tough to carve out market space, even for a mammoth company like Amazon, and Jeff knows it. So what’s his strategy?

Contents

It’s to create a point of differentiation and then to focus on that uniqueness.

In Jeff’s (sales) letter, he introduces the new smart phone:

Dear Customers,

We’re excited to unveil our newest innovation–Fire, the first smartphone designed by Amazon.

Fire is the only smartphone with Dynamic Perspective and Firefly, two new technologies that allow you to see and interact with your world through a whole new lens.

Dynamic Perspective uses a custom-designed sensor system that responds to the way you hold, view, and move your phone. It opens up a new class of immersive apps and games not possible on other smartphones, as well as one-handed navigation and gestures like auto-scroll-read long web pages and books without ever touching the screen.

Firefly is a new technology that quickly recognizes printed web and email addresses, phone numbers, QR and bar codes, artwork, movies, music, and millions of products, making it easy to discover information, share items with friends, and more. It works in seconds-simply press and hold the Firefly button.

Fire is the only smartphone to put everything you love about Amazon in the palm of your hand–instant access to over 33 million songs, apps, games, movies, TV shows, audiobooks, magazines, and books, plus exclusive features like Mayday, ASAP, Second Screen, X-Ray, free unlimited photo storage in the cloud, and more.

It’s also packed with powerful hardware–a 13MP camera with optical image stabilization for stunning photos and 1080p HD video, a 2.2 GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM for fast, fluid performance, a beautiful 4.7″ HD display, dual stereo speakers, and Dolby Digital audio.

Fire is available exclusively on AT&T. You can pre-order yours today. For a limited time, Fire also includes a full year of Amazon Prime–FREE Two-Day Shipping on millions of items, unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Prime Instant Video, unlimited, ad-free streaming and downloading of over a million songs and hundreds of playlists, and over 500,000 books to borrow from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. If you’re already a Prime member, we’ll add 12 months to your existing account.

Thank you for being a customer,

[Jeff’s Digital Signature]

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
PS — You can experience Fire in person at AT&T stores on 7/25.
PPS –If you’re a developer, feel free to check out our powerful SDKs for both Firefly and Dynamic Perspective.

[Social Share Icons]

Bolding in the letter is mine.

Jeff starts the first sentence, “We’re excited to unveil our newest innovation.”

This indicates that Amazon is a company that produces new and cool gadgets, and likely will continue to do so in the future — no surprises there.

Jeff then immediately sets the phone apart by focusing on what’s unique about the Fire. It’s that it has Dynamic Perspective and Firefly. He’s chosen two Unique Selling Points to focus on. The ordering is important. Dynamic Perspective is meant to be its strongest selling point. The fact that it’s packed with powerful hardware came in almost as an afterthought (it’s in the second last paragraph).

You can see the emphasis on the Fire’s USPs all across its communication — from the home page, to its video, to its message on social sharing. When you click onto the product page for Fire, the Fire introduction video automatically pops up and plays. The video shows the positive surprise reaction of people first, instead of displaying the smart phone. And what’s the surprise in response to? The Dynamic Perspective, of course. The video spends what feels like half the time talking about Dynamic Perspective.

If you click to share the page on Facebook, the message that comes up by default is, “The first smartphone from Amazon / The only smartphone with Dynamic Perspective and Firefly”

Amazon Fire Post to FB

What does this mean for you?

Focus on your point of differentiation in the market place. The more competitive the market place, the more you should be focused on a USP. If you’re the only person doing what you’re doing, then that by itself can be your USP.

This message should be consistent across all of your communication platforms (website content, email marketing content, social media content, etc.) as well as across your funnel if you have one (from PPC Ads to Landing Page to Confirmation Page to Email Content to Sales Letter to Follow Up and so on).

Finding the market gap or your USP can be difficult. A useful exercise to do is to see what your top 10 competitors are doing and document what their message is on a spreadsheet.

Some may focus on being the “lowest price”, “highest quality”, “best service”, something else that’s fairly generic, or in most cases, just have no message at all.

To give you an idea of a good USP, see Apple’s “Hold 40,000 Songs in Your Pocket”
apple%20songs%20in%20your%20pocket%20-%20Google%20Search

When Apple came out with its iPod, there were already plenty of mp3 players available on the market. I had a Creative Zen which I actually preferred over the iPod (and frankly think that the Zen was a better product!). But none of the existing mp3 manufacturers had very good marketing messages. It was all about technical specification. How many gigabytes the mp3 player could hold or how long it could last.

When you create your USP, there are a few things that you should keep in mind:

  • Is it repeatable?
    When you tell a friend about Amazon’s Fire, you’ll probably remember something about Dynamic Perspective (though not the name which is not a very good one in my opinion since it sounds technical and certainly not particularly memorable). If you’ve watched the video, you’re more likely to remember the phone which is primarily why they show the video automatically and try to get you to watch the video on the home page also
  • Is it easily understood?
    Try to keep it simple and use everyday language. If you’re operating in a business to business market, then industry jargon that’s specific to your audience can work well. But in most business to consumer cases, technical language doesn’t work very well so stick to simple language.
  • Does it attract (your ideal) customers to you?
    If it’s a USP that repels or has no effect on your intended audience, try something different

Other Lessons

  • Digital Signature — this makes the letter feel more personal and in my split tests, it’s shown to improve conversion rates by 3 or 4%. Use signature where possible, especially on sales letters.
  • PS and PPS — the most important text is the headline. The next is the PS. Jeff wrote in his PS that “You can experience Fire in person at AT&T stores”. Leave important messages in the PS (& PPS) on letters and emails. For sales letters, it can work well sometimes to restate the offer in brief.

 

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