Tag: loyalty

  • Amazon Prime VP Jamil Ghani: “Prime is Not A Loyalty Program”

    Jamil Ghani is the Worldwide Vice President of Amazon Prime, leading product, technology, marketing, decision science, operations, and finance teams that build and operate the membership program for over 200 million members across 26 countries.  

    He sits down with Natalie at the end of the Amazon Prime analyst event in Seattle to discuss the latest innovations and strategic direction of Prime. They explore:

    • The key pillars of Prime: convenience, savings, entertainment.
    • With new Prime markets like Colombia and Ireland, Jamil discusses why Amazon aims to launch Prime internationally “as quickly as possibly but as slow as necessary”.
    • What Prime is NOT: Jamil says it’s not a loyalty program, not a breakage model, and not a loss leader.
    • Is Prime nearing saturation? Learn where Jamil sees opportunities for further customer acquisition in the US.

    The first half of the episode focuses on Natalie’s takeaways from the Amazon Prime analyst event. If you’d like to skip straight to the interview with Jamil, this starts at 10 minutes.

    * Natalie will be releasing a Forbes article with more insights from the event later this week. *

    Jamil’s bio:

    Over his 7-year tenure, Jamil has accelerated Prime’s growth, tripling the membership and doubling per member spend. He has also broadened Prime’s offerings, expanding to 13 new countries and launching new benefits in multiple high-value categories, including health care, grocery, and restaurant food delivery. He works across Amazon’s consumer businesses to innovate on behalf of customers, build the Amazon and Prime businesses, and make customers’ life better every day. Before coming to Amazon in 2017, Jamil served as Senior Vice President, Enterprise Strategy, Digital & Innovation, for Target Corporation. Before that, he spent five years at The Walt Disney Company focused on identifying, developing, and launching travel and leisure growth initiatives. This included the MyMagic+ experience system, Shanghai Disneyland Park, and Aulani destination resort. Jamil holds a BA magna cum laude from Harvard College in economics and computer science and an MBA from the Harvard Business School, where he was selected as a Baker Scholar. Jamil lives with his wife and two (soon to be three) daughters in Bellevue, WA.

    Find out more about the Retail Disrupted Podcast by visiting retaildisrupted.com

  • Measuring Stores in a Post-Pandemic World

    Measuring Stores in a Post-Pandemic World

    Is bricks & mortar retail facing an existential crisis or a rebirth?

    In a world where shoppers can buy just about anything online and have it delivered the very same or next day, it’s not unreasonable to ask – what is the point of stores? How can stores possibly differentiate when online shopping offers near-infinite assortment, hyper-personalisation and, increasingly, immediacy?

    Over the past 18 months, bricks & mortar stores have been periodically forced to shut their doors and divert their customers to their least profitable channel – e-commerce. Retailers commendably pivoted, and consumers quickly adapted. But what happens next? Will habits learned during lockdown stick, accelerating the demise of the physical store, or will shoppers revert back to their old ways as normalcy resumes? Regardless, the pandemic-induced shift to digital has magnified the urgency for retailers to repurpose the physical space. There will be no return to the status quo.

    So how do retailers balance the need for short-term agility with long-term vision? And, more importantly, what data should retailers be using to measure their success?

    In this virtual debate hosted by Teradata, Mikael Bisgaard-Bohr, Vice President of Teradata EMEA, Clive Humby OBE, Co-founder of dunnhumby and chief architect of Tesco’s Clubcard, and I explore the key traits required as retailers navigate the complexities in this post-pandemic digital era.

    “Historically, stores have measured two things – ‘how much and where’ – but what we need to understand is ‘who and why’,” said Humby. “We have got to stop thinking about just the transaction itself.”

    Major high street retailers like Next believe that stores now face a “fundamental and irreversible disadvantage” to online and like-for-like sales declines will remain the new normal. I tend to agree. In a post-pandemic world, the role of the store will be three-fold – transact, inspire and facilitate online shopping. If the role of the store is no longer purely to sell, then how should we be measuring its success? Going forward, metrics like dwell time, conversion rates, staff satisfaction and percentage of online orders collected/returned instore are going to be a whole lot more meaningful than measuring the inevitable decline in transactions made within a retailer’s four walls.

    Watch the full debate.

  • Tesco can’t emulate the success of Amazon Prime with Clubcard Plus

    Tesco can’t emulate the success of Amazon Prime with Clubcard Plus

    Subscriptions have become the holy grail for retailers as the sector moves away from competing purely on product and increasingly on service. Recurring revenue and driving loyalty with your most important shoppers—what’s not to like?

    Tesco has become the latest retailer to jump on the subscription bandwagon. Britain’s biggest supermarket plans to bundle its grocery, mobile and bank offerings under a new scheme called Clubcard Plus. Here’s how it works: shoppers pay a £7.99 monthly fee in exchange for a 10% discount on two big shops in-store; 10% discount on select private label products; double data from Tesco Mobile and a Tesco Bank credit card with no foreign exchange fees abroad.

    As lucrative as subscription models might be, they only work if customers see the value in them. Just ask Jeff Bezos. The aim of Amazon Prime, he says, is to provide so much value that shoppers would be “irresponsible” not to join. A scary thought for any competitor.

    With Prime, the value is clear—sheer, unrivaled convenience layered with increasingly indispensable entertainment perks. With Clubcard Plus, the value exchange is a bit murkier. Firstly, if customers want low prices, they’ll head to Aldi or Lidl. They don’t need to fork over £8 a month and jump through a bunch of hoops.

    Note: this is an excerpt. Continue reading Natalie’s full article on Forbes.