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Amazon Prime has helped transform anonymous à la carte purchases at the biggest web retail outlet into a loyalty-driven multimedia member experience. Prime members are Amazon's avant-garde, coming to everything a little bit earlier — including the company's newest experiments with its website.
New job postings at Amazon, unearthed in a Wells Fargo Equity Research note, show that Amazon is creating a "Prime Expansion" team to drive adoption of the subscription service, expand its content offerings and geographical reach, and create new Prime programs "in new places (on and off Amazon) … that will allow for a rapid expansion of the Prime program everywhere!"
What does that mean? Some of the postings suggest Amazon is simply giving things Prime already does a boost: acquiring more content for streaming video, boosting renewal rates, even when they are newly laden with ambitious targets like "come help us achieve our goal of making every customer a Prime member!"
Still, there are clearly a few things that are brand-new for Prime:
- Expansion of Prime delivery from Italy and France to Spain;
- A targeted customer acquisition campaign for Amazon Student and Amazon Mom;
- New Prime-specific user interfaces for eventual deployment across Amazon.com;
- A similar labworks project for automated marketing, first for Prime customers, then across Amazon.com: "Our end goal is to remove entirely humans, wherever possible, from the process of content targeting and optimization, by building fully-automated engines to measure and converge on optimal solutions";
- A senior product manager, charged with helping "define the next stage of Prime benefits" beyond shipping and the current media offerings.
The idea, essentially, is to run Amazon Prime as an "early-stage startup-like environment where features and systems design are still fluid," as one listing writes. "We are not iterating on an existing space, we are blazing new trails."
Some of this is clearly just talk. Like Facebook's invocation of the "Hacker Way," it helps Amazon, a giant, well-established company, attract and flatter hotshot engineers who might otherwise gravitate towards an actual startup, not a "startup-like environment."
At the same time, though, Amazon Prime does offer the retailer a perfect place to test new ideas. Prime addresses Amazon's most loyal customers, who consume both the largest number and the widest range of physical and virtual goods. And it offers them what GigaOm's Mat Ingram has called "the velvet rope": a private beta, a chance to get things first.
More than expanding Prime and its fulfillment services outside Amazon.com, that tight customer experience is valuable to Amazon. It's valuable to customers, too.
Amazon wants to be the 21st century Walmart, but Walmart with a white glove, a personal touch. Hundreds of millions of customers, all thinking they have a special relationship with a megastore, with no upper limit on how much they can buy. That's a kind of loyalty that's forever.
