Ranee Soundara wrote an article titled Amazon Prime Day Emails are a Dumpster Fire. The article was prompted by some promotional emails from Amazon pitching very lame personalized product selections. With the vast amount of big data that Amazon has available about past purchases as well as searching and browsing history, she notes that Amazon was promoting products remarkably off base—a major marketing failure for a company for a company whose profits come from selling purportedly leading-edge AI/ML technology through AWS.
Prior to the article, Soundara commented in a Twitter thread, “I’m just airing my frustration on companies that talk about personalization, but suck at it.” In response, I opined that “Personalization as a gimmick fails” and “Authenticity in human communication/relations is not something that can be codified into an algorithm or scripted into a training manual.” Soundara responed, “But I think it could be, were just not there yet.”
In another Twitter thread, Soundara commented specifically about her Amazon Prime email experience. I replied, “I wonder if Prime Day is more of a PR stunt. It has generated a lot of media attention in the past.”
Is Prime Day an effective sales promotion? A Bloomberg article titled Searches for ‘Canceling Amazon Prime’ Spike on Prime Day notes the following: « “If Amazon is hoping to use Prime Day as a way to sign up and retain new Prime members, they might need to rethink their retention plan,” Captify said… “According to search, consumers are signing up for Prime, getting their deals and then canceling membership shortly after.” »
Articles of Interest 