Marketing and Management Report: Amazon Alexa Product Analysis

This report provides an analysis of Amazon Alexa, focusing on its attributes and benefits as a virtual assistant AI-powered smart speaker developed by Amazon. The report details the product's features, including voice interaction, music playback, and smart home automation capabilities. It examines the new product development process, outlining key steps such as idea generation, concept development, and market strategy. The report also explores the product life cycle of Amazon Alexa, placing it in the growth stage, and discusses the company's approach to pricing and product portfolio management. The analysis is supported by references to relevant sources, providing a comprehensive overview of Amazon Alexa's marketing and management aspects.

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MARKETING AND MANAGEMENT
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MARKETING AND MANAGEMENT
1. Attributes and Benefits of chosen product
“Amazon Alexa”, is a virtual assistant AI technologically oriented smart speakers. It was
developed by the “Amazon Company” was inaugurated in “November 6, 2014”, and was
initially incorporated in “Amazon Echo smart speakers” and is developed by “Amazon
Lab126”. The product has acquired worldwide popularity and is capable of various activities,
like interaction through voice, playing music and podcasts, creating memorandum
(alexa.amazon.com, 2020). The product has the utmost capability in controlling several other
smart devices by enabling smart home automation system. According to statistics, there has
been increased sales of 100 million Alexa enabled devices.
2. Benefits of core, actual and augmented products.
The interactional interfaces, which can be operated by voice or text messages, can provide
users with proficient user experience. The easy usage of the application has contributed to the
popularity of the product. The Amazon Alexa is considered an augmented product but is now
popular as an actual product, as it is a nonphysical part of an existing product. The core
product satisfies the basic need of a customer, and is on process and represented as a
prototype. The actual product is the tangible product available to customers.
3. New Product Development Process
Every company, while launching product crosses following “new product development”
processes. The eight important steps in developing a new product is “Generation of ideas,
Screening of idea, Development of concept and Testing, Marketing strategy development,
Analysis of business, Development of product, Test marketing, commercialization of the
product” (Relich & Pawlewski, 2018). The first step is the incorporation of the idea, which
includes new innovative ideas in an actually existing product or in generating new product,
which leads to filtering of ideas and choosing the best option that will develop a quality
product. Concept development is analyzing the product components according to that testing
is done so that it matches with consumer demands.
4. Product Life Cycle

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Every product as its own life cycle, there are three important steps in the Product Life Cycle
(PLC), Growth, Maturity and Decline phase. Amazon Alexa has been launched in the 2014, but
already has a billion of users within 6 years of its launching, and can be considered to be in
growth stage (Arnett & Chinta, 2018). One of the biggest space Amazon has created for
themselves is the pricing; they price their product according to the demands of the buyers. This
has led to the immense popularity of Alexa.
5. Process by which company explains their product portfolio
The various dimensions of managing product portfolio is improving their competencies,
investing in more innovative ideas to develop their product, identification of most demanded and
less demanded product in accurately allocating resources to the most demanded product (hbr.org,
2020). The improvement in collaboration among employees and building interaction with buyers
will help in building product portfolio.

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References
alexa.amazon.com (2020). Retrieved 26 March 2020, from https://alexa.amazon.com/
Arnett, J., Goldfinch, B., & Chinta, R. (2018). Multi-dimensional nature of innovation at
Amazon. International Journal of Business Innovation and Research, 15(1), 1-13
(https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c7e4/2618d608966d1ef628e34d0c1be49e7b41c9.pdf).
hbr.org (2020). Retrieved 26 March 2020, from https://hbr.org/1981/01/designing-product-and-
business-portfolios
Relich, M., & Pawlewski, P. (2018). A case-based reasoning approach to cost estimation of new
product development. Neurocomputing, 272, 40-
45(https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2017.05.092)