Amazon Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Amazon - Essay Example Amazon remains focused on providing convenience and excellence in customer service, much of which is promoted with the assistance of technologies. The company’s internal culture is aligned to respond and adapt to changing market conditions, giving the business a significant competitive advantage over other rivals. 2. The features of Amazon’s strategy Amazon is a leader in understanding its target market characteristics and then adjusting the organisational culture, products and services, and marketing strategies to appeal to these known characteristics. Amazon has identified three market segments that the business will service, including consumer customers, seller customers, and developer customers. It is a very customer-centric organisational model that seeks, primarily, growth as an objective. Amazon accomplishes this by establishing a pricing structure under a price leadership strategy, offering a vast assortment of merchandise, and injecting convenience into the bus iness model (Stockport 2010). The business’ vision to be the most consumer-centric business in its industry reflects how Amazon continues to develop strategies, both corporate-level and business-level, to ensure that it fulfils these promises for focus on providing value to its many diverse markets. One method of promoting this value and convenience is the recent program entitled Frustration-Free Packaging, which was designed to ensure consumers could easily remove their products from Amazon’s packaging. Cloud computing, additionally, provides its developer customers with low-cost IT services and the ability to outsource many business functions for further cost-savings. The continual development of new services, such as the MP3 Music Store, IMDb.com allowing for television program viewing, and launch of the Office Supplies Store in 2008, illustrates the constant evolution of the business model that caters to a wide variety of target markets with varying needs. Innovati on, as compared to competition, is what makes this business model difficult to replicate by rivals and secures the promises of being consumer-centric that makes up the foundation of corporate strategy. 3. Analysis of Amazon’s internal environment Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, is a firm believer in corporate frugality. In the company’s headquarters, this thrift is evident with employee desks that have been recycled from doors, at an estimated cost of $130 USD and monitors that rest on telephone books to avoid the high costs of stands (University of Graz 2013). Amazon maintains very powerful competitive advantage as it relates to human capital, having established a firm set of values and a shared vision that allows for decentralised business function for better teamwork and interpersonal relationship development. In order to develop the appropriate service culture necessary for Amazon to achieve its mission of consumer-centrism, the organisation must have leadership t hat is visionary, one that establishes and iterates mission and vision, and inspire others through positive and ethical leadership traits (Fairholm 2009). Figure 1: Internal Competency Framework Success factors for internal efficiency Figure 1 illustrates the six competencies of the internal organisational culture at Amazon that contribute to fulfilment of the customer-centric mission and vision. The decentralised structure provides employees with opportunities to engage socially and professionally to establish a team culture that is flexible and where knowledge transfer is part of the organisational model with tacit and explicit knowledge holders in multiple divisions of the business model. Coupled with a cultural attitude for reducing overhead (the Amazon frugality culture), the business is able to devote more resources