Newfangled #31: On why mugging Grandmas is not an OK sales tactic
Talking about deceptive customer journeys and why no one wakes up in the morning wanting to see an advert
While trying to avoid commenting on the Chief Twit, I find myself once again talking about Amazon, the company that Jeff Bezos proclaimed he wanted to make the Earth’s most customer-centric company. It’s more than a year since I started trying to break up with Jeff B. See the previous edition here. And things have gotten worse.
Part 1 - You can check in but you can never leave
The user journey to cancel Amazon Prime has been found to be deliberately deceptive. In fact, they had a project - under the codename - Project Iliad to make it difficult to cancel. For those of you not familiar with The Iliad, it’s an ancient Greek poem that is 24 books long.
Amazon is often cited in digital transformation circles for the way it asks its employees to propose new ideas in a future press release format.
So, for the purposes of comedy, I’ve imagined what the press release for Project Iliad might have looked like:
Amazon.com announced the launch of Project Iliad, a new user journey to retain subscribers to our popular Prime subscription service. There are currently over 200 million prime subscribers worldwide. Occasionally, some of these users try to unsubscribe. But in their heart of hearts, they really want to stay with Amazon, so we have made it easier for them to stay subscribed by making it almost impossible to leave. We aim to reduce attrition by 14% by making customers work through 5 pages of additional steps. For more information about this service, go to amazon.com/cancelprime and try and escape the doom loop.
In the words of Mark Emup [fictional name -Ed], project lead, said, “we have gathered extensive data on our customer usage habits. In particular, we know that older demographics are less familiar with navigating websites. They also can have large retirement funds. In our testing, the additional steps were particularly effective with silver surfers. We almost ditched the name Iliad, in favour of ‘Mug a Granny.’”
The only thing I haven’t made up is the statistics - they really did reduce attrition by 14%. Various consumer/ trade organisations in different jurisdictions are investigating. But it’s hardly the action of the Earth’s most customer-centric company.
Part 2 - You can’t always get what you want
Has anyone been on amazon.com recently and noticed just how difficult it is to find what you want? Unlike the Rolling Stones song, if you try sometimes, you might not even get what you need.
Why is that? Because almost the entire feed of search results is sponsored content. It’s all adverts.
And a truism of life which I have added alongside ‘life’s not fair,’ and ‘the goalposts always move’ is that:
No one wakes up in the morning wanting to see an ad. - Unknown.
In 2021 Amazon collected over $30 billion in advertising revenue from sellers on its platform, which was a 32% increase over 2020.1 Amazon is now snapping at the heels of Google and Facebook for ad spend.
But at least it’s cheap, right?
And we’re supporting small businesses on Amazon marketplace, right?
Truth bomb: Up to 45% of the price of that product you buy might be fees to Amazon, particularly the cost of getting that product onto your screen and not languishing 20 pages down.
Worse still, you might not find it cheaper anywhere else as Amazon has been using ‘most favoured nation’ clauses meaning that suppliers can’t charge cheaper places elsewhere. Sounds fishy? Well, anti-trust organisations think so too. In economics, this is called a monopsony. My friend, Jeff Roberts has coined the phrase ‘supplier capture’ which is both easier to say and to visualise that Amazon is effectively controlling the market as a buyer.
So, just for fun, let’s mock up that press release again, imagining we’re the Earth’s most customer-centric company.
Amazon.com announced the launch of Project Ad-em [this names fictional -Ed], a new way for customers to find the best product.
In the words of Mark Emup, “With approximately 1.5 million active sellers in our marketplace, being top of the search results needs to be earned. It used to be earned by being the most popular, the cheapest or the one with the best reviews. From today, we’ve decided that it will be the seller who pays us the most money. And even then, sometimes we will put ourselves at the top of the results because we can. Shareholders are already telling us how much they love it.”
And what’s a consumer to do? Well, you could look at the reviews, but there’s a whole industry outside of Amazon peddling fake reviews.
But for me, the biggest issue is that it just makes the customer journey worse than sifting through a jumble sale.
But Mick Jagger might be right, if you try sometimes, you might get what you need.
The Round-Up
What we’ve been watching?
Late to the party, I’ve been catching up on The Walking Dead, being textbook proof of the popularity of the back catalogue on streaming services
What we’ve been reading?
An early sales deck from Hubspot (CRM tool) Inbound Marketing: A Love Story
What we’ve been enjoying?
This ridiculous charades game: Who’s the Dude? Yet again proving my adage that not all innovation needs to be digital
See you next time!