Amazon Cancels Happiness In Worst Branding Move in Its History
This week Amazon canceled the Amazon Smile charity donation program. It's a bit like the Grinch canceling Christmas. Good luck with that approach.
Except for some of its commercials, Amazon avoids aspirational brand-building. Instead, it views ruthless efficiency as the way to consumer's hearts.
The approach has served it well. In fact, in the past few years, brand surveys found Amazon more trusted than the police department, Disney, and Apple. (I guess they forgot to poll sellers?)
It feels this week that the efficiency strategy has finally flown into a mountain as Amazon has canceled one of the only programs which allowed customers to feel better about their purchase - Amazon Smile.
How Did Amazon Smile Help Amazon?
Literally (!) the entire purpose of a brand is to trade something with low value (i.e. the letters of your name on a product), for something of high value (a premium price).
The goodwill they got from this 0.5% donation was tremendous, far outpacing whatever costs or efficiencies they will claim to be saving here (also - don't donations get a writeoff? I have a feeling part of this is technical debt and bodies managing the (apparently inefficient?!) program.
Perhaps they should have remembered Jeff's famous quote:
"If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000.”
What Amazon Got Wrong:
Terrible psychobabble PR-speak email closing the program.
It cements the fact that charities are really not important at all to them. If the goal was to create a bigger impact, they would have swapped the program for a more effective one rather than canceling one.
Don't expect a replacement coming soon. If it does come, they have already poisoned the well.
It also reveals that Amazon's cost-cutting is more relentless and urgent than you may have thought.
Finally it also reveals a few other things:
Amazon is the opposite of the traditional brand who tries to virtue-signal and make you feel good about your purchase.
Consider programs like Bombas' one for one - can you imagine the operational overhead of that program for a brand like Bombas?
Yet they continue it.
If you ever wonder why real Fashion will not succeed on Amazon, this is it. Amazon doesn't understand the value of its own brand, how can they be expected to understand the value of yours?
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