Lessons Learned from Amazon’s Prime Day

Caid Christiansen• September, 23 2015

LexisNexis recently published a few select data insights from the social media monitoring that they conducted during Amazon’s “Prime Day” promotion. For those of you who don’t recall, on July 15, 2015, Amazon staked out the day as “Prime Day,” a day of ongoing discounts and flash sales that they promised would be bigger than Black Friday.

Almost immediately, Wal-Mart responded with a plan to offer discounts throughout the day as well. With media attention focused on the battle between the two retail giants, customers flocked to Amazon early in the morning to check out the deals.

Social media feedback was swift, and it was overwhelmingly negative. Complaints about the quality of the deals were common–customers who were expecting Black Friday-type deals were disappointed by the clearance categories that Amazon presented. If you listened to the media reports during, and immediately after, you’d think Prime Day was a huge flop. The New York Times delivered the headline, “More Fizzle Than Sizzle on Amazon’s Prime Day”

The LexisNexis data supports this, showing that positive mentions of Amazon’s deals during Prime day dropped by 10%.

Despite the bad press, Amazon almost instantly announced that Prime Day would be a recurring event. And, looking at the numbers you can see why. Even though the “buzz” was negative, Amazon posted sales 266% higher than the same day the prior year. And Prime Day sales for 2015 were higher then 2014 Black Friday sales by 16%.

So, how did Amazon achieve such tremendous results? They were able to stake out and “own” a media cycle. While Amazon’s share of media was only around 10% for the 2014 holiday season, they owned over 60% of the total retail media during the days leading up to Prime Day.

In promoting a new (and noteworthy) event, they were able to disrupt the normal retail cycles and create tremendous traffic. So, while the deals didn’t live up to expectations, the sheer volume of traffic made the day a success.

One thing that Amazon could have done better was managing the social reaction on Prime Day. When #PrimeDayFail started trending, Amazon certainly benefitted–short term–from the increased attention and traffic to the site. Their reaction to the waves of commenters was slow, though, and the brand image was tarnished.

Overall, Amazon did well for themselves–crafting a promotion that garnered a lot of attention. The sales numbers were great. However, the social and media monitoring shows that Amazon still had opportunity with a proactive brand defense strategy to more quickly respond to unmet expectations.