Integrated Marketing Communication for Amazon

This report analyzes Amazon's segmentation analysis, persuasion analysis, current advertisement analysis, and IMC practices. Amazon uses geographical, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral segmentation. The company uses the 7 tools of persuasion to persuade its clients. Amazon's current advertisement strategy focuses on pain points, emotional values, and USP of the brand. The company uses traditional and web 2.0 tools of marketing for its IMC practices.

Running Head: Integrated Marketing Communication
Amazon
Integrated Marketing Communication
Individual Report

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Table of Content
Identification and Analysis.....................................................................................................................2
Segmentation Analysis..........................................................................................................................2
Highlight of Amazon segmentation analysis......................................................................................2
Persuasion Analysis...............................................................................................................................3
Analysis of Current Advertisement........................................................................................................4
Current IMC Practices............................................................................................................................5
References.............................................................................................................................................6

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Identification and Analysis
This section of the study will focus on primarily four Aspects in relation to Amazon.com:
 Segmentation Analysis
 Persuasion Analysis
 Analysis of current advertisement
 Current IMC Practices
Segmentation Analysis
The underlying purpose of segmentation analysis is to identify a group or set of people who will be
interested in the offering of the company; it is the first step of STP process which further leads to
development of IMC strategies for the company. Hence, segmentation is the process of dividing the
population into groups with certain characteristics (Kingsnorth, 2016). Amazon uses 4 strategies to
segment its market;
 Geographical Segmentation-As the name suggests, this type of segmentation is based on
the geographical location of the customers.
 Demographic Segmentation-Segmentation on the basis of demographic elements like; age,
nationality, culture, religion, income, family size and so on
 Psychographic Segmentation-Segmenting the customer on the basis of value and lifestyle
(Grant, 2016).
 Behavioural Segmentation-Classification of customers according to their buying behaviour.
Highlight of Amazon segmentation analysis
Geographic- Product selling and distribution in more than 180 countries, penetration in both urban
and rural market (Liang, Ma, Wang & Yan, 2017).
Demographics- Sells product to people over the age of 18 who are bachelors, families, young couple,
labour force and retired people and are either students, working professionals and
employees(Brotspies & Weinstein,2017).
Behavioural-People are hard core, soft core loyal and switchers, people looking for wildest range of
products, convenience of online shopping and seeking benefits (Tu, Tung & Goes, 2017).

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Psychographic-All social classes including the lower, middle and upper class. The lifestyle can vary
from struggler, reformer, aspirer, explorer, resigned, mainstreamer and succeeder.
Persuasion Analysis
A person at any given point in time needs persuasion, hence marketers and advertisers have to
come up with content and tools to help their ads to stand in the crowd. Amazon brilliantly uses the 7
tools of persuasion to persuade its client in the following ways:
Reciprocation- Amazon uses the persuasion tool of reciprocation by providing excellent customer
service to its customers in response to their purchase with the e-commerce giant. Another way of
reciprocation is by pushing organic feed to the customers depending on their taste and preferences.
Community and Consistency- Amazon continuously evolves its business practices to be a customer
centric organization, it has created a strong community of online shoppers on the social platform
who have a practise of reviewing the products and sharing feedback with other potential customers,
the practise is consistent in nature, thus being extremely persuasive.

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Social Proof- The social proof of Amazon’s persuasive tools lies in its high impact CSR activities which
are targeted towards the environment and the people living below the poverty line.
Liking-Amazon has been using the remarketing and retargeting marketing for the people who have
showed interest in the company’s product offering, but somehow have not purchased them. The
company organically shows them the products they showed interest in thus persuading them to buy
the products.
Authority-Amazon persuades its customers by exercising the power of authority by proving, claiming
and citing its leadership position in the e-commerce market. The company through social media
posts, advertisements, press releases and public relations team shows its dominance over other
competing firms which persuade the customers to buy their product.
Ensure ethical Standards-Amazon is known to be highly ethical in its practices, the company tries to
offer cost leadership to its customers and ensures superior quality of its products, thus ensuring that
it ensures the ethical standards to persuade the customers to make a purchase.
Scarcity- Amazon uses scarcity as a tool of persuasion by coming out with limited period sale or offer
for its normal or prime customers. These limited time deals persuades the customers to take the
leverage of limited offer and secure substantial benefits for themselves.
Analysis of Current Advertisement
The journey of Amazon starting from the year 1994 to now have been uplifting, satisfying and based
on strong consumer sentiments. Since start, Amazon’s advertisements have been talk of the town.
Ogilvy, which is the advertising agency of Amazon puts tremendous efforts and participates in
brainstorming with the team of Amazon to deliver strong results for the brand. The current
advertisement strategy of Amazon is based on the following pillars, which serve as preamble for all
its advertising campaign:
 Focus on the pain points or the areas of concern for the customers.
 Creating 3-4 TV advertisement for one customer market, targeting different age groups. The
company uses both online and offline channels for this purpose (Stadler, 2017).
 Amazon creates different advertisement for different markets. For example India market is
different from the Asian market, US from the European market and so on.

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 The company always points out the USP of the brand in the advertisement, for example,
assured same day delivery, widest range of products, minimum price guaranteed.
 Amazon relies on creating emotional values for its customers through advertising, and it
tries to keep the duration of ad short to remove boredom and focuses on specific parts
which have to be conveyed in the advertisement.
 Amazon leverages the power of any big festival, or event or a special occasion of the country
to launch a new advertisement, this helps the company in building connect with the local
market and the community.
Current IMC Practices
As mentioned earlier, Amazon uses the traditional and the web 2.0 tools of marketing as a part of its
integrated marketing communication practices. The underlying criteria of the IMC practice is based
on increasing the reach of its campaign, act to create simple experiences for the customers, convert
the strategy into clearly identified result and engage with the customers for repeat business. Some
of the IMC practices of the company are:
 TV advertisement to increase the reach and brand awareness of the company and its
product offering. TV is still a popular and effective media in communicating message to the
customers, the company banks heavily on it.
 Amazon is a market leader when it comes to create marketing content for online channels; it
focuses on remarketing, retargeting, consumer profiling, highly targeted content and in
organic marketing to target the millennial (Lorenzo, 2017).
 A number of media releases by the company issued to the general public of the sale and big
billion days are an addition to its IMC strategy.
 Amazon is using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat to engage with the audience
and turn them into repeat customers and persuade them to buy more and more products
from Amazon (Miles, 2014).

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References
Tu, Y., Tung, Y.A. and Goes, P., 2017. Online auction segmentation and effective selling strategy:
Trust and information asymmetry perspectives. Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, 18(3),
p.189.
Brotspies, H. and Weinstein, A., 2017. Rethinking business segmentation: a conceptual model and
strategic insights. Journal of Strategic Marketing, pp.1-13.
Liang, X., Ma, L., Wang, H. and Yan, H., 2017. Examples from Industry. In Inventory Management
with Alternative Delivery Times (pp. 9-15). Springer, Cham.
Kingsnorth, S., 2016. Digital marketing strategy: an integrated approach to online marketing. Kogan
Page Publishers.
Grant, R.M., 2016. Contemporary strategy analysis: Text and cases edition. John Wiley & Sons.
Lorenzo, L., 2017. Targeting International Customers in Japanese E-commerce: A Web Content
Analysis of the Marketing Mix in Rakuten and Amazon. co. jp.
Miles, J., 2014. Instagram power: Build your brand and reach more customers with the power of
pictures. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education.
Stadler, D., 2017. Amazon Case study driving customer equity. Proceedings of MAC 2017, p.276.

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