Amazon and the Minds Behind its Matter

By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 10 January 2012, 02:02 IST
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Bangalore: When Jeff Bezos, in 1994, thought of revolutionizing the way books were, an online bookstore named Amazon was born. Sixteen years later, the fields of IT, and marketing lie in its wake, all changed forever. Amazon proved to the world that it could be a new comer and yet dominate. Jeff Bezos couldn’t have done it alone though—and CNN’s Money distinguished the men who turned the enterprise around, from a bookstore to a tech giant.

1. Jeff Bezos: He founded the company as a site that helped its customers buy books online, and then opened it up to its competitors as well. This one strategy of his proved to be so successful that they continued to do the same, even to their cloud services. Enterprises could rent storage on the cloud, without actually owning a super computer. He also effectively visualized the virtualization of the book so that four million Kindles sold in December alone.

 

2. Diego Piacentini: Although Amazon started only with domestic sales at first, the company has grown to such an extent that 45 percent of its sales occur abroad, and Piacentini, the Senior President of Intl. Retail takes care of it all. In 2005, he insisted the company refund 5 RMB (Chinese currency) to every customer that ordered a Harry Potter book before a price drop occurred. The result? “…it turned out not only [to be] a good thing for the customer, it was also the best marketing activity we did that year”, he said.

 

3. Jeffrey Wilke: The Senior VP of North America Retail, Wilke heads the fields of pricing, merchandising, and marketing in the US. Under his leadership, Amazon stopped selling goods that wouldn’t realize any profit. He is said also to be responsible for working behind-the-scenes for introducing automation for a number of tasks, as well as for focusing on workers’ safety at distribution centers.



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