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Amazon Strategic Management

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Question 3- Amazon owes its leadership to a set of distinctive capabilities developed and improved over time. Describe and argue whether Amazon’s business model is easy or hard to imitate, in accordance with the four cornerstones of robustness – i.e. complexity; causal ambiguity; culture and history; change. Be specific and illustrate by examples.

Amazon developed from being just an online retailer - online bookstore - to a web services provider for sellers and now moving into providing web technology infrastructure development. The business model core of the company is a 'customer-centric' long term market leadership continually providing the lowest prices possible and wider selection in order to continually improve the customer experience. Amazon's Long Tail strategy relies on three pillars, all supported by its continual commitment to innovation and investing in the future:
- selection: Amazon provides the widest selection of products from retail products to software and Cloud Computing offerings.
- price: Amazon is committed to price leadership with no sacrifice to quality.
- convenience: Amazon strives to continually 'please' its customers by offering customer review and feedback forms on all of its product.
In order to fulfill the customer experience, the company opened strategically located centers in a number of cities in North America, Europe and Asia, often near airports and recruits 'tightly' around their need to service the customer, strengthening its management team with senior managers from a variety of companies such as Wal-Mart, Apple, Delta Airlines and Microsoft. Moreover Amazon invests continually in technological innovation, improving efficiency thus lowering operating costs and enabling the company to offer lower prices to customers and invests heavily in R&D to improve customer experience. Its best competency was to build a

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