Dana Mattioli’s Post

The order of the day - Battle of the retailers. The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power,” seems to offer a critical examination of Amazon’s business strategies and its impact on the corporate landscape. The narrative about recruiting a Trader Joe’s manager highlights Amazon’s approach to building its private label offerings, a move that underscores the company’s broader strategy to dominate various market segments. Amazon’s practices, including leveraging sensitive data for competitive advantage, have been a subject of scrutiny and debate. The book appears to delve into these c issues, shedding light on the inner workings of the company and its drive for market supremacy. As for CEO Andy Jassy’s reported ambition to grow Amazon into a $10 trillion company, it reflects the scale of vision and aggressive growth targets that have characterized Amazon’s journey. The offer of a signed bookplate for preorders is a common promotional strategy to incentivize early purchases and generate buzz around new book releases. For those interested in corporate strategy, technology, and the future of commerce, this book could provide valuable insights into one of the world’s most influential companies. #Amazon #Traderjoes #Risetothetop #BookRelease

Amazon's foray into private label food brands involved ambitious strategies reminiscent of its broader approach to business expansion and competition. In developing its Wickedly Prime brand, Amazon attempted to emulate the success of Trader Joe's by replicating its top-selling products. The company enlisted a former Trader Joe’s senior manager, who discovered the project's true nature only after joining the team. Amidst secrecy, she was coerced into providing sales data under intense pressure, reflecting Amazon's cutthroat culture and aggressive strategies to outperform competitors and win market share. This intense corporate environment is further exemplified by Amazon's use of stack ranking and high employee turnover, designed to maximize performance and loyalty. However, such tactics, coupled with unparalleled access to vast amounts of data across various sectors, have positioned Amazon as a formidable force in retail and beyond, prompting ethical concerns and regulatory scrutiny. Amazon's strategy extends well beyond retail, leveraging data to disrupt multiple industries and integrate itself into daily consumer habits. Yet, as the company faces lawsuits from the Federal Trade Commission for alleged monopolistic practices, parallels are drawn with historic corporate giants like Standard Oil, suggesting potential regulatory repercussions. Amazon's story is marked by innovation and controversy, as it challenges traditional business practices and faces increasing scrutiny over its methods and market dominance. #AmazonStrategy #TraderJoes #RetailDisruption #DataDriven #MonopolyConcerns #FTCLawsuit #CorporateCulture #Innovation #MarketDominance https://lnkd.in/ePZsQWkb

Amazon has targeted Trader Joe's for at least a decade, The Wall Street Journal reports, trying to crack the secrets to its #retail success and replicate — literally — its top-200 #products. If they cd only figure out which ones those were. [pro tip: mint chip ice cream and those salt-and-pepper chips shd be on the list … ] So … #recruit #managers and stock up on brown butcher paper to cover the windows. TJ’s, owned by ALDI SÜD I think, one of the German brothers scions, doesn’t sell #online which is weird, #AmIRight, #Amazon? so youse can’t figure stuff out from there. Do y’all know about the Fearless Flyer? “This reporting draws on hundreds of pages of internal documents and emails, and #interviews with more than 600 #employees, #partners, #competitors and #regulators. They show that Amazon often had its thumb on the scale, creating scenarios to give itself a leg up or create hit products at the expense of rivals.” This sounds like a super fun #article to report … and read. https://lnkd.in/ggxJKHW5 #beer #wine #cheese #grabngo #bananas!!!

As much as Amazon as both a business and a consumer makes me appreciate the ingenuity of the business model, their dominance in retail and apparent monopoly is a concern not just for us but many. They control around 40% of US online shopping - an insane amount of market power. We've all heard how Amazon reverse-engineers competitors and then breaks their strategy. But they allegedly had an entire "secret war room" just to analyse Trader Joe's top 200 products. What surprises me is Amazon choosing to bombard a player like Trader's Joe which might be only a fraction of what Amazon is. This is an interesting article questioning Amazon's dominance and the power it withholds which they don't shy away from using with an intensity that tells that they are going after every competition, big or small. #traderjoe #amazon #ecommercebusiness #consumerbrands

Not a terribly attractive view on Amazon's culture - a clip from an upcoming book. The first part of the article describes the aggressive war room approach to attacking Trader Joe's, which hasn't worked terribly well, but is revealing and rings true. Several employees were fired for obtaining proprietary data from Trader Joe's--presumably only because another employee triggered an investigation, but the pressure the culture placed on those employees is what really matters in the real world, and that pressure to rapidly grow and consume other companies and industries is what's driving big tech today. Due to the massive combined size of big tech, in order to continue to grow, they must destroy the businesses or even entire industries of customers, which was a minor issue by comparison during the MSFT antitrust era, for example. Nothing quite like this situation in history -- some elements of antitrust in each era in banking, railroads, and telecoms, but nothing quite like this combination. Suffice to say that it's going to be difficult for big tech to continue to grow unless they begin unbundling and spinning off what would be large companies. Should Amazon have acquired Whole Foods, FB Instagram, MS LinkedIn, or Google YouTube? Probably not from a market health perspective. Beyond acquisitions, however, are the large internal businesses like AWS. If Amazon, Microsoft, and Google were required to spin off their cloud businesses, it would have an enormous positive impact on the economy. Apple is a bit different, but similar in terms of impact if they were not allowed to dominate apps for iPhone, for example. The irony is I can see a path through spin offs where the combined values of these companies would approach today's values. Otherwise, it makes no sense at all to me. ~~~~~ Well beyond snacks, Amazon’s private-label employees for years have looked at the proprietary data of its third-party sellers on Amazon.com to reverse engineer bestsellers and undercut them on pricing. Entrepreneurs who have met with Amazon’s dealmaking or venture-capital arms complain that Amazon executives pumped them for intelligence about their inventions and shared proprietary information with other Amazon teams that stood to benefit only to ghost the entrepreneurs and create similar Amazon products. Adapted from “The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power” written by Dana Mattioli, to be published by Little, Brown and Co. on April 23, 2024. https://lnkd.in/g6uF22uS

We live in times where unimaginable events regarding climate disasters, pandemic crises, public safety issues, and economic failures have become a more normal occurrence.  So, as unimaginable as it sounds, what if one giant company someday wiped out nearly all of the retail and food shops in your community and dominated the market so forcefully that it could dictate the terms of the supply chain? Sounds impossible, right. But we should consider this enlightening article in WSJ: "Inside Amazon’s Push to Crack Trader Joe’s—and Dominate Everything." Below are a few eyebrow-raising excerpts: • Amazon is the number one, two or three player in a staggering number of industries from e-commerce to cloud computing, giving the company unrivaled access to partner, seller and even competitor data. • Amazon’s private-label employees for years have looked at the proprietary data of its third-party sellers on Amazon to reverse engineer bestsellers and undercut them on pricing. • If your company made money, Amazon views you as the competition and is coming for your business. • In meetings with senior leaders, Bezos described a world where customers didn’t visit Amazon once a month for various items like paper towels and batteries. Instead, Amazon would become embedded in the customer’s lifestyle. • The Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon for being an illegal monopoly, contesting that Amazon’s dominance in e-commerce in the U.S., where 40% of all online shopping happens on Amazon, creates higher prices for consumers. • "Amazon now takes one of every $2 that a seller makes, so sellers are effectively paying a 50% Amazon tax that has steadily been increasing over the last decade. And prices are higher for shoppers as a result,” said FTC Chair Lina Khan of the lawsuit. I'm well-versed in the "may the best person win" arguments, but there's a big difference between innovation and choice and progress and exclusive trade control. We need a healthy and diverse array of small, medium, and large-scale retailers, but with two-thirds of customers starting their search on Amazon, sellers have no choice but to sell on their platform, pay their fees, abide by their rules, and allow them to access to their data and use it against them. But it doesn't stop there. Amazon has used its mushrooming power to control everything around it, including building massive logistics operations, surveillance capabilities, and cloud computing infrastructure. At what point does this market domination strategy become a game of one player/one choice? #business #retail #food #grocerystores #supermarkets #malls #monopoly #consumers #America #vendors #suppliers #smallbusiness #startups #entrepreneurs #retailers #bookstores #clothing #fashion Trader Joe's #future #americandream

Amazon’s “total addressable market” is “everybody else’s operating margin”. Put another way, if your company made money, Amazon viewed you as the competition and was coming for your business. This WSJ article is full of interesting information about Amazon’s business model and culture . A must read. #amazon

https://lnkd.in/e7ccwfci Amazon is facing scrutiny for aggressive business tactics, including using competitor data to dominate the market. This investigative report explores how these practices could impact the future of global commerce and fair competition. Darin W. White

An Amazon Strategy *works* with a higher systemic logic, a completely different conceptual frame, almost as a sixth sense: it intuitively understands how to see and sustain itself as a self-generating market, one that is able to keep feeding an economic system that Andy Jassy believes has the potential to become a $10 trillion company — the world’s largest by valuation — over the next decade. Writes Dana Mattioli here, in an excerpt from her forthcoming book, The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power: "Amazon is the number one, two or three player in a staggering number of industries from e-commerce to cloud computing, giving the company unrivaled access to partner, seller and even competitor data. An intense culture combined with unparalleled leverage and data across industries has made Amazon one of the most powerful and most feared companies in business history." Markets aren't about technical push. They're about gravitational pull. #ModernStrategy

So Amazon wants to crack Trader Joe's code? I don't blame them, but they're going about it the wrong way. This week, The Wall Street Journal published an article on Amazon's efforts to replicate the top 200 items sold at Trader Joe's—among other things—and the lengths they've gone to uncover the secret sauce behind their success, including literal corporate espionage. Trader Joe's has an absolutely rabid fan following and a winning formula that no one has successfully replicated. That's why I selected "Becoming Trader Joe" by the company's founder, Joe Coulombe, as this month's selection for the HSR Book Club. Even though it was written in 1967, it contains the secrets and blueprint that Joe used to build his business, which still forms a large part of their strategy today. https://amzn.to/444ofTy The team at Amazon could have had a much easier time trying to replicate the top 200 items Trader Joe's sells just by slowing down, looking at the information that's right in front of them, and reading this book to understand the ethos of Trader Joe's and the strategy behind their business approach. For Amazon, or anyone, looking to build a cult-like business and replicate what Trader Joe's has done, keep these top two things in mind: 1. Keep Your Target Customer in Sight: Trader Joe's mastery in catering to a niche market has been pivotal to its growth. The company has flourished by prioritizing what their customers enjoy and need above everything else. Dive deep into understanding your target demographic; rather than persuading them to buy what you offer, discover their desires and meet those needs directly. 2. Treat Your Employees Well: Echoing Richard Branson, Joe Coulombe believes, “The way you treat your employees is the way they'll treat your customers.” By treating employees with respect, kindness, and appreciation, you foster a work environment that enhances customer relations, bolsters brand loyalty, and creates a positive business image. If you're interested in joining the conversation this month, I am sharing my thoughts and prompts on how you can apply the learnings from "Becoming Trader Joe" to your life, business, or job in my weekly newsletter. https://lnkd.in/d-BeDbTT #startups #growth #traderjoes #amazon https://lnkd.in/dkAW5aGz