Amazon Prime VP on Why Prime is Not a Loyalty Program
Plus London Tech Week, Payment Resilience, Nadine Merabi, and the (Tech) Mafia
You might have known that Amazon Prime has over 200 million members globally. But did you know that 70,000 of them have been Prime members since it launched 20 years ago?
That’s one of the interesting nuggets I picked up on my recent trip to Seattle to attend Amazon’s first-ever Prime Analyst Day. It was a great opportunity to hear firsthand from senior execs and to ask those probing questions. What next for grocery? How will Alexa+ change the way we discover products? Is Prime a loss leader? (No.)
I covered five key takeaways in my latest article for Forbes. Let me know what you think!
🎧 Hear from Amazon Prime VP Jamil Ghani
I also had the opportunity to speak to Jamil Ghani, Worldwide Vice President of Amazon Prime, for the podcast.
“Take your classic gym membership. They sell more memberships in January than any time of the year. And they actually sell more memberships than they have capacity for. If everybody showed up, it would be a really poor customer service. And.. by late summer, the membership is down and also the usage is down. Prime does not operate that way.” -Jamil Ghani, Worldwide Vice President of Amazon Prime
Jamil and I discussed:
📦 The key pillars of Prime: convenience, savings, entertainment
🌎 With new Prime markets like Colombia and Ireland, Jamil explains why Amazon aims to launch Prime internationally “as quickly as possibly but as slow as necessary”.
❌ What Prime is NOT – Jamil says it’s not a loyalty program in the classical sense, not a breakage model and not a loss leader.
🛍️ Is Prime nearing saturation? Learn where Jamil sees opportunities for further customer acquisition in the US.
London Tech Week, Payment Resilience, Nadine Merabi, and the Mafia
Check out my latest blog post When the Till Goes Silent: The Urgent Need for Payment Resilience. Covering key learnings from a breakfast roundtable I attended in Westminster this week. Very relevant in light of recent cyber attacks.
I hosted a panel debate on supply chain evolution at London Tech Week with Tesco, Unilever, and DHL. Coming to the podcast soon but in the meantime, you can read more about it here.
Learn why 800% growth was the worst thing that happened to fashion designer Nadine Merabi in this episode.
I ended the week recording an episode in central London with a member of the mafia. The tech kind, that is… Any guesses? ❓❓❓ Coming to the pod soon.