The source of Amazon’s competitive advantage

The early movements of dotcom shares were -

Followed the overall stock market closely

Closely parallel to historical patterns of share prices in mew industries

Shocking

Entirely unpredictable

The plan Amazon had was -

A combination of many sources of competitive advantage

Purely to do with internet retailing

Based primarily on exploiting a whacky brand

Easily copyable by other players

The name Amazon was chosen because -

He could not really think of anything else

Bezos had a short attention span (he could only be bothered looking at the A words)

It was a symbol of competitive power

He had a dream of a giant river sweeping away the existing players and their books

A differentiation strategy is one where you -

Add superior value and charge more for it

Decide to do something quite unusual

Deploy some quite new technologies

Have a quite narrow product and customer need focus

A cost leadership strategy is based -

On competing primarily by having the lowest costs - enabling lower prices

Something alongside a reorganisation

Primarily on cutting costs

On having the highest prices

When you have a differentiation strategy -

You do not really pay much attention to cost control at all

You really cannot afford to dilute it in customer-focused areas

It is attractive to do as it makes you feel better

A little slip up in one or two areas like that is neither here nor there

Strategy generally, like at Amazon -

Comes really from externally generated opportunities alone

Just comes out of a SWOT analysis

Can be developed too from looking at what you are really good at, competency-wise

Is purely about strategic vision - and drops out automatically from that

Robust strategic options can be best evaluated -

Through SWOT

Using tools like the Strategic Option Grid

Just through intuition

By simple pros and cons

The Amazon strategy to charge for data storage is -

Will not really work, as Amazon doesn’t have the skills to do business-to-business

A hopeless diversification

An interesting example of exploiting core competences

Obviously, mission impossible

When my wife asked Amazon for a new Kindle over a year after she bought it -

It was an obvious mistake

They were very stupid to give it to her

They were very enlightened, actually

They were certainly going to destroy shareholder value as it would be longer term that they would get more value from that relationship to compensate for the write-off

The source of Amazon’s competitive advantage

The early movements of dotcom shares were -

The plan Amazon had was -

The name Amazon was chosen because -

A differentiation strategy is one where you -

A cost leadership strategy is based -

When you have a differentiation strategy -

Strategy generally, like at Amazon -

Robust strategic options can be best evaluated -

The Amazon strategy to charge for data storage is -

When my wife asked Amazon for a new Kindle over a year after she bought it -

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