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Test & Learn– AMAZON approach

It’s incredibly fascinating how they apply speed to market in their operations. And we will stop referring to the e-commerce giant as soon as they stop innovating at this pace. But for now, there’s a lot to learn. Do you remember the Internet of things? Buzzword we’ve been hearing a lot in the past 5 years, and it’s still unclear what it really means. On paper, it’s a world where everything and everyone is always connected, but no company has been able to take this mainstream. In the event in Seattle, Amazon yesterday announced a lot of new Echo devices, a car device, a microwave, an AI plug, and even a clock. So, yesterday they took a crack at IOT and they did it in perfect Amazon-style, by innovating and by launching multiple products, and see what sticks to the wall.

What does it mean for us marketers?

Well if Amazon, a trillion $ organization is able to operationalize this test and learn approach in everything that they are doing, why aren’t all the other organizations doing that? They take a humble approach to everything that they are doing. They do not know what product might be successful or not and this is the reason why they embraced a full-on “lean methodology” through a build-measure-learn cycle that comes from the startups’ ways of working. Starting with an assumption, they go to market with multi-variation of the same product/service and they really let the market decide. A lot of them will fail, some will be a little more successful and some other ones will be home runs. But even if they don’t smash it out the park, they will succeed at one thing for sure: “learning” in order to not make the same mistake again and feed insights in the next iterations.

Of course, not all companies have the amazon’s financials and resources, but the main point to focus on here is their attitude towards the go-to-market strategy. We can be dealing with a big campaign or a small always-on workstream, but the Amazon approach can very easily be applied to our clients even for our marketing efforts. So, we as marketers should try to push the boundaries in order to implement a test and learn approach to increase efficiencies and maximize our client’s investments. Most of the time we know how the market could react to our marketing activities, but in the instances when we don’t know, we should probably recommend an approach that is more like Amazon and a little less like Don Draper.