I ran an interesting post and white paper from Joe Davis entitled “Beating Amazon by Creating Shopping Experiences,” which presents an idea similar to what I advanced a few years ago in “Selling the Experience“, namely that anyone trying to compete with Amazon for selling products successfully really has to focus on the product experience. My post was triggered by this TechCrunch article.
I think Joe Davis is spot on:
I bought my book at Amazon, but that was not shopping. It was not the experience I want when I go shopping. Shopping to me, and to your best customers, is a much more interesting and emotionally engaging activity. To be successful, you need to create an equally rich experience with your online store.
In my view there are four aspects to an enjoyable shopping experience: Exploring, Feeling, Personalizing, and Sharing.
In the teaser for the white paper download, he emphasizes the need to “[d]ifferentiate with rich interactive brand experiences.” In my post before, I was focused on the idea of providing a tool that can make such experiences, not for the high-end design shops (who are hired by big brands and can afford to make expensive one-off’s), rather, for the affiliate marketer. While I never got the chance to build the tool I talked about before, in the way I had wanted, these kinds of reminders help me to know I was on the right track–and maybe someone out there will help enable me to see my vision through.