Author of Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly
Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly
by Emily West
How Amazon combined branding and relationship marketing with massive distribution infrastructure to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy.
Summary of Buy Now
Amazon is ubiquitous in our daily lives—we stream movies and television on Amazon Prime Video, converse with Alexa, and receive messages on our smartphones about the progress of our latest orders. In Buy Now, I examine Amazon's consumer-facing services to investigate how Amazon as a brand grew so quickly and inserted itself into so many aspects of our lives even as it faded into the background, becoming a sort of infrastructure that can be taken for granted. Amazon has promoted the comfort and care of its customers (but not its workers) to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy.
I unpack how Amazon has cultivated personalized, intimate relationships with consumers that normalize its outsized influence on ourselves and our communities. I describe the brand's focus on speedy and seamless ecommerce delivery, represented in the materiality of the branded brown box; the positioning of its book retailing, media streaming, and smart speakers as services rather than sales; and the brand's image control strategies. I consider why pushback against Amazon's ubiquity and market power has come mainly from among Amazon's workers rather than its customers or competitors, arguing that Amazon's brand logic fragments consumers as a political bloc.
Buy Now is the first book to examine Amazon from a critical media studies perspective, offering a cautionary cultural study of bigness in today's economy.
What Experts Are Saying
“West brilliantly documents how the global master of one-click shopping, ubiquitous surveillance, and monopoly power became a serious threat to democracy, the climate, and a humane workplace.”
— Vincent Mosco, author of The Smart City in a Digital World
“How did Amazon get to its high perch of digital retailing, and how does it stay there? In interrogating this question through a number of insightful lenses, Emily West's Buy Now raises fundamental issues about commerce and consumer politics in the twenty-first century.”
— Joseph Turow, author of The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet
“Buy Now is an indispensable resource for thinking through, struggling with, and questioning our relationships with Amazon. West provides an astute and urgent analysis about how the ecommerce site has subtly pervaded our everyday lives in the past twenty-five years—and how big tech attempts to shape our collective futures.”