Marketing Plan for Amazon Alexa: Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning and Marketing Mix

This marketing plan focuses on enhancing the demand for Amazon Alexa in the global market. It includes mission, vision, marketing and financial objectives, segmentation, targeting, positioning strategies, and marketing mix strategy for promoting Alexa in the target market.

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Marketing Practice

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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Mission and vision...........................................................................................................................3
Marketing and Financial Objectives................................................................................................4
Marketing objectives....................................................................................................................4
Financial objectives......................................................................................................................4
Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning........................................................................................5
Marketing Mix.................................................................................................................................6
Product.........................................................................................................................................6
Price.............................................................................................................................................6
Place.............................................................................................................................................6
Promotion.....................................................................................................................................6
Budget Allocation............................................................................................................................7
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................7
References........................................................................................................................................8

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Introduction
Marketing plan is a crucial part of business plan which includes marketing and financial
objectives along with the strategies to attain those goals and objectives. Primary objective of
marketing plan is to enhance the demand for the organizational existing or new products and
services in the existing or in the new target market. This marketing plan will focus over
enhancing the demand for the Amazon’s Alexa in the global market. Amazon Alexa is a smart
speaker and based on the concept of artificial intelligence. With the effect of globalisation, every
organization is trying to be unique with the objective of developing unique image in the global
market in order to attain competitive advantage. Amazon has plethora of product offering
through which the organization has been able to target a different customer segments. In order to
target millennials and tech enthusiasts, organization has recently launched Alexa which is a
smart speaker which has the capability of acting as a personal artificial assistant. Motive of
launching this device is to enhance their customer base along with enhancing their customer
satisfaction through which effective brand image could be developed amongst the target
audience (Alexa, 2018).
This marketing plan will include mission, vision, marketing and financial objectives with regards
to the Alexa followed by segmentation, targeting, positioning strategies to analyse the suitable
customer segments for the organization. Next part of the report will include marketing mix
strategy for promoting Alexa in the target market along with describing the budget allocation for
the promotional campaigns.
Mission and vision
Organizational vision is to “be the earth’s most customer centric company” and with regards to
the introduction of Alexa, organization is implementing its strategies and designing its goals and
objectives on the basis of customer’s satisfaction and their requirements. As Alexa falls under
the luxurious product category, Amazon has made their mission to target upper middle and upper
class customer segments for enhancing the demand for Alexa along with accomplishing desired
goals and objectives (Business Insider, 2018).

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Organization has made their mission and vision clear with respect to the introduction of Alexa.
Alexa is a smart speaker capable of doing things like streaming podcasts, making to-do-lists,
music playbacks, voice intercalation, providing information regarding sports updates, weather,
traffic, etc. Apart from this, Alexa could also control various other smart devices with the help of
home automation system. It was launched in November 2014 in the United States and till
February 2018, Alexa is being launched in 8 countries and till the end of 2018. With regards to
this, organizational mission is to launch Alexa in all those parts of the globe where Amazon
operates in terms of enhancing the demand of the product in the international market along with
gaining competitive advantage over its competitors i.e. Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri, and
Google’s Home (Canbek & Mutlu, 2016).
Marketing and Financial Objectives
Marketing plan’s main motive is to enhance the demand amongst the target audience regards to
the products and services introduced by the organization. In this scenario, marketing plan is
being designed for enhancing demand for the Alexa in the other global parts through which its
approachability in the global market could be enhanced. Alexa is a smart speaker with various
functionalities and in order to spread awareness amongst their major target segments i.e.
millennials and tech-enthusiast, organization will adopt relevant digital media strategies through
which desired financial and marketing objectives could be attained. With regards to the
introduction of Alexa in the other global markets, following are their marketing and financial
objectives:
Marketing objectives
 Spreading awareness amongst the target customer segments along with making them
realise the significance of Alexa (Chen, et. al., 2014).
 Approaching to large part of the customer segments in developed and emerging
economies.
 Enhancing the demand of Alexa by 30% by introducing it into other different countries
and with the use of digital media strategies.
 Attaining competitive advantage in the global artificial assistance market.
 Developing a practice amongst the target audience for the use of virtual assistant.

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Financial objectives
 Amazon stands with the top four companies across the globe in terms of market value.
With regards to this, Amazon’s primary financial objective in relation with Alexa is to
grow their revenues approximately by 30% so that it could gain the leading position in
the global market.
 Increasing profitability and sales by 20%.
 Cost of production of Alexa is already less because Amazon is using their own cloud
storage services to store the data for Alexa and in order to target large part of the target
audience, several other fair pricing techniques will be adopted to make it available and
reasonable for different categories of customers (Chung, Iorga, Voas & Lee, 2017).

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Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning
Segmentation Type Segmentation Criteria Target Customer Segment
Geographic Region Alexa is available in 38
countries
Density Urban areas.
Demographic Age Above 18 years (Dale, 2015)
Gender Male & Female
Life Cycle Stage Lifetime.
Occupation Business professionals,
Students and all other
customer segments.
Behavioural Loyalty High brand loyalty for
Amazon due to which demand
for Alexa could easily be
enhanced (Demirkan, Spohrer
& Welser, 2016).
Psychographic Social class, lifestyle Upper middle class and higher
class people.
Amazon has launched Alexa majorly in the developed economies because it is a luxurious
product and launching this into developing and under developed countries is not substantial for
the organization. Apart from launching it into developed economies, organization has also
introduced it into Indian market which is a developing economy. The primary reason for
launching Alexa into Indian economy is the growth rate of the Indian economy due to which
Indian market has become of the favourite destination for foreign companies to expand their
business. Apart from this, Alexa’s primary customer segments are millennials and tech-
enthusiasts because curiosity amongst them regarding with a new product is very high in
comparison to the other categories of customers. In order to position an effective brand image,
Amazon will use their brand loyalty and existing marketing campaigns. Along with this,

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organization will mainly focus over trending and big digital media platforms in order to target
their primary customer segments by spreading awareness in relation with the features, and
significance of the product (Forrest & Hoanca, 2015).

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Marketing Mix
This is the most effective and appropriate marketing strategy which is used for the spreading
awareness amongst the target audience in relation with the company’s products and services. In
relation with the current scenario, marketing mix technique will be designed and implemented
for enhancing the demand for Alexa in the target market.
Product
Alexa is a smart speaker which acts as a virtual assistant and it is capable of doing various
activities for its owner such as helping in scheduling the appointments, making a to-do-list,
remembering important dates, playing music from different platforms, providing regular updates
for sports, traffic and weather, etc. Apart from these functionalities, Alexa could also be operated
by different users making new accounts and it is a secured device which will not release private
information of one user to other. For now, Alexa has been launched in the form of smart
speakers as Echo and Echo Dot. Both these speakers require adequate quality internet speed to
perform as per the customer’s expectations (Hoy, 2018).
Price
Currently, Amazon has adopted fair pricing strategy to target larger part of their target market
but in the coming time, organization will make slight changes in their pricing strategy by
adopting price skimming strategy. With the help of this strategy, organization would be able to
fulfil its desired marketing as well as financial objectives (López, Quesada & Guerrero, 2017).
Place
Currently, Amazon Alexa has been introduced in 38 countries across the globe and by the end of
2018; organization will introduce it in Italy and in Spain in their native languages for generating
demand. It is available on Amazon’s official website with different payment options to target
different customer segments (Iachini, et. al., 2016).
Promotion
With regards to the promotion and advertisement of Alexa in the target market, major focus will
be over digital mediums of advertisement because their primary target market segments are
millennials and tech-enthusiasts and they are the major users of social media platforms and other

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digital media platforms in comparison to the traditional forms of marketing. Apart from this,
organization would also rely upon the effective traditional forms of marketing such as bill
boards, newspaper advertisement and promotion through event sponsorship marketing in order to
generate demand and for spreading awareness in the marketplace (Lauterbach & Bonim, 2016).

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Budget Allocation
Particulars Budgeted investment ($ in ‘000)
Social media:
Facebook 95
Twitter 55
Instagram 50
Email marketing 100
Others 50
Traditional mediums of marketing 200
Event marketing 150
Integrated marketing communication 325
Others 150
Total 1125
Conclusion
It has been concluded that marketing plan is an essential document for every organization in
order to select the suitable target market for the introduction of new products and services. Along
with this, it has also been considered that marketing plan helps the organization to execute their
strategies in an effective manner which ultimately results in accomplishing organizational goals
and objectives. This report has concluded marketing plan for Amazon Alexa which is a smart
speaker and effective in terms of performing various tasks on behalf of their users.

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References
Alexa. (2018). Alexa’ Marketing Stack. Retrieved from: https://www.alexa.com/.
Business Insider. (2018). The best smart speaker you can buy: Amazon Echo vs. Google Home
vs. Sonos One. Retrieved from: https://www.businessinsider.com/best-smart-speaker-
amazon-echo?IR=T.
Canbek, N. G., & Mutlu, M. E. (2016). On the track of artificial intelligence: Learning with
intelligent personal assistants. Journal of Human Sciences, 13(1), 592-601.
Chen, Y., Wang, Y., Nevo, S., Jin, J., Wang, L., & Chow, W. S. (2014). IT capability and
organizational performance: the roles of business process agility and environmental
factors. European Journal of Information Systems, 23(3), 326-342.
Chung, H., Iorga, M., Voas, J., & Lee, S. (2017). Alexa, Can I Trust You?. Computer, 50(9),
100.
Dale, R. (2015). The limits of intelligent personal assistants. Natural Language
Engineering, 21(2), 325-329.
Demirkan, H., Spohrer, J. C., & Welser, J. J. (2016). Digital innovation and strategic
transformation. IT Professional, 18(6), 14-18.
Forrest, E., & Hoanca, B. (2015). Artificial Intelligence: Marketing's Game Changer. In Trends
and innovations in marketing information systems (pp. 45-64). IGI Global.
Hoy, M. B. (2018). Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and More: An Introduction to Voice Assistants. Medical
reference services quarterly, 37(1), 81-88.
Iachini, T., Coello, Y., Frassinetti, F., Senese, V. P., Galante, F., & Ruggiero, G. (2016).
Peripersonal and interpersonal space in virtual and real environments: Effects of gender
and age. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 45, 154-164.
Lauterbach, B. A., & Bonim, A. (2016). Artificial intelligence: A strategic business and
governance imperative. NACD Directorship, September/October, 54-57.

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López, G., Quesada, L., & Guerrero, L. A. (2017). Alexa vs. Siri vs. Cortana vs. Google
Assistant: a comparison of speech-based natural user interfaces. In International
Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (pp. 241-250). Springer, Cham.