Attention Economy
In this section, Attention Economy as a concept of Internet business is highlighted, then attached to Amazon’s way of doing business, to explain why the firm is successful. It also lays the foundation for examining the networking economy and eventually the sharing economy features that are evident in Amazon’s case. Attention on the web is scarce, and Amazon appears to have figured out how to obtain attention from both seasoned and casual visitors to its pages online. A combination of affiliate market, traditional advertising, and peer reviews serve to pique the interest of shoppers.
As attention is the highest currency in the online world, Amazon is doing all it can to align its business strategies to advance product offerings to all forms of media delivery platforms relevant for the electronic age (Harris & McLaughlin, 2016). In the rapid information landscape of the Internet, a main point of focus for online business is to attract and maintain the attention of consumers. With the introduction of smart-phones, tablets, compact laptops, and mobile media devices, the frequency and speed of which a consumer will view and dismiss pages, sites, and content, has increased dramatically, gaining the attention and encouraging interaction are important factors for online business to consider.
As the Internet continues to expand its reach into online commerce, information, and data, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” (Crogan & Kinsley, 2012). Amazon has addressed this issue of attention in a number of ways: cross-platform functionality and stability, user-driven reviews, and targeted marketing across the Internet. Algorithms to monitor consumer behaviour and trends are incorporated into individual user experiences, to ensure targeted advertising of Amazon’s relevant products and services, outside of the Amazon site itself. Attention as a commodity is an integral part to successful online business, so it has become just as important as to HOW to gain consumer attention, as opposed to WHAT is being offered to consume.
Early users of Amazon enjoyed extra services offered by the site, such as personalised gift-wrapping and notification services that informed them when their favourite authors had just published a book (“Amazon.com Inc. History”, 2016) – these extra services and features helped to draw consumers in and increase the amount of time and attention they gave to the site, whilst also increasing the possibility of securing more sales. From an early date, Amazon knew it had to leverage the attention span of its customers, in order to create further purchases throughout the site. By continuing to personalise customer experience, and make them feel like they were a part of the site (through the implementation of user-driven comments and discussions), the economy of attention was gained and maintained.
Amazon has used the product-review features on its websites as magnets for capturing consumer attention. The offer of positive and negative reviews invites other consumers to contribute to the discussion, asking questions, clarifying points and so on. As users add content about a product on Amazon, they also offer reasons for more people to spend time on the site, which is valuable to the company. Research about co-production with consumers has shown that such arrangements can improve a firm’s innovativeness, they can enhance brand reputation, and they can lock in customers to make them loyal to a company (Harrison & Waite, 2015). With Amazon, the co-creation of the customer’s experience appears to allow the company to optimize its sales funnel techniques to convert more visitors into repeat buyers.
Amazon estimates that every one second wasted in converting a visitor into a purchaser could translate to a total of $1.6 billion in overall sales (Eaton, 2012). Such emphasis on not wasting time and the constant tweaking of the sales funnel are just some of the methods that Amazon uses to improve its agility. An agile business can withstand changes in demand, and it has a strong connection to their supply chains (Mitra & Gupta, 2007). In Amazon’s case, these points illustrate the firm’s full grasp of what it takes to survive in an attention economy.
Not only is it doing things to tap attention from customers, but it is also ensuring that the cost of doing so remains low so that the firm can persist with the strategy. The example of using customers to co-create the customer experience is a perfect exhibit of how the firm’s innovativeness for cutting costs while subscribing to notions of the attention economy pays off. The additional attention from customers is supposed to lead to improved sales.
The other strategies that Amazon uses to succeed in the attention economy are making sure that page speeds are fast, personalizing the shopping experience according to a visitor’s history, and ensuring that searching for goods and services happens quickly. Amazon has made its websites usable on mobile and constantly uses new techniques to cut page loading time (Oxford, 2013). Other improvements have been on continued testing, having user reviews and recommending similar products to sustain consumer interest (Oxford, 2013).
Opening up the Amazon case shows that the company gains when consumers feel empowered to take part in the co-creation process. As consumers do so, they become engaged with the Amazon platform, and this makes it easy for Amazon to keep on targeting them with other offers (Harrison & Waite, 2015). If the firm had not first brought consumers on board with its co-creation endeavours for product reviews, it would be difficult to convert existing and new customers into repeat customers by offering product recommendation based on their browsing activity.
The points noted above confirm that the company has understood the basis of surviving in an attention economy. They attest to the ingeniousness of the company’s management ability to adapt its resources to the opportunities that are availed by changes in the online business environment. In retrospect, companies that succeed in their industries and manage to defend a large market share are the ones that stay innovative. Therefore, the arrangement of the techniques at Amazon used to lure customer’s attention appears as a critical factor to the success of the firm’s strategy of surviving the attention economy.