Read an interesting article this week that talked of a new service which Amazon are rolling out in India. Amazon Now enables customers to shop for daily essentials across a range of categories and have them delivered locally within 2 hours. The company will work together with local grocery retailers to fulfil the orders. This has been taken up by two of the shop chains who have a number of localised locations.
In our own company, we recently ordered an office product from Viking Direct at 3.30 in the afternoon. It arrived at our office from the Midlands of England by 9 am the next morning. That is a faster service than many local office supply companies are willing to provide. The ordering process took about 5 minutes
‘Speed to market’ and ‘ease of purchase’ certainly create huge areas of competitive edge in a world where we can buy anything from anywhere at the touch of a button.
The lessons to learn from this are huge. For the smaller, owner managed organisations wishing to reflect and think about how they can compete more effectively, a quick trawl and questioning round the marketing cycle can often provide ideas for quick wins and medium term strategies. Sometimes, it also helps to have someone who sees the business from the viewpoint of the customer.