Amazon‘s Black Friday advertising is in full swing with their UK sales running for 10 days (50 days in the US). This is nothing unexpected – it was largely Amazon that brought the Black Friday US phenomenon to the UK so you’d expect them to go big on marketing.
What I do find interesting is the reaction of Amazon to eBay’s advertising. eBay launched this year a #FillYourCartWithColour campaign rebelling against the ‘shopping is beige’ experience that we’ve all become accustomed to. On eBay, the message goes, you can live your life more colourfully and even eBay’s packaging (with a monthly free allowance for eBay Featured and Anchor Shop subscribers) is vibrant and brightly coloured.
So what can Amazon do to compete? Well they obviously sat down, looked at their beige boxes and came up with making the black Amazon smile come to life. In both their Christmas and Black Friday adverts those dull beige boxes with the Amazon logo are suddenly dancing and singing along to catchy tunes and the marketeers have turned the beige shopping experience into a thing of magic. It’s an interesting lesson in how to turn a setback into an opportunity. Incidentally, if you look at the Amazon site today, you’ll see that their beige boxes are now featuring against colourful backgrounds.
Amazon have been pretty marketing savvy here – they’ve not mentioned eBay’s ‘shopping is beige’ dig at their boxes, they’ve simply reacted by embracing their packaging and making them a plus, not a disadvantage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOgp0JZRtL8
One Response
“fill your cart with colour” doesnt mean anything. not a damn thing (least of all outside the US where we don’t have ‘carts’).
are they suggesting you should buy a lot of paint? no, that would be silly.
they are TRYING to instill the belief that ebay is vibrant, unique, buzzwordy, “not the standard fayre” however their actions are equivelent to throwing beige paint everywhere.
if we have a product we consider to be even remotely “colourful”, in this meaning of the word (unless ebay are literally on a campaign to eradicate non-pastille shades), then ebay is the last place we’d consider listing it. ebay is the not the friend of the non-conformist these days.
ALL ITEMS MUST HAVE A BARCODE / EAN / MPN AND COMPLY WITH OUR STRICT IMAGE POLICY AND BE REFERRED IN OUR CATALOGUE AND HAVE NO WATERMARK OR UNIQUE INDICATORS AND CONFORM TO ALL RULES THAT KILL ANY AND ALL SIGNS OF ‘COLOUR’.
if you have nothing tangible to offer, then vaguely aspirational comments seem to suffice as a substitute. not that “filling with colour” is actually an aspiration, it just sounds vaguely so.
– By tangible i mean, for example, Tesco saying “we’re cheaper than Asda” or vice versa. an actual reason for an actual person to actually shop there. not some ephemeral quasi-aspirational nonsense.
why not give up the colour crap, and just shout “strong and stable” at every opportunity?
Amazon do a bloody excellent job of getting you what you want, when you want it, at the best price. who actually cares what colour the box is?
– I’ll tell you. nobody. not a soul. it’s bin-fodder, not a product of desire.
– “fill your bin with colour” should be the mantra if all they are referring to is pastille packaging. the actual contents getting bieger by the day.
– what you might care about, regards packaging, is environmental friendliness, cutting down on waste, using the minimum packaging to best effect for the good of the planet etc….. I do recall one of the large marketplaces tackling such concerns head-on….
The maximum impact of the colour campaign is some old dear saying “ooh that’s different” before chucking the packaging in the bin. if the item is even ten pence cheaper elsewhere the next time, she’ll go elsewhere.