Jeff Bezos on Amazon’s Personalization Strategy

i really like amazon, ordering books from them every month or so. they are not trying to build short-term and fancy stuff (like using pastel colors and all) but had UI choices that made sense in the long-term instead.

but just one thing: during the last month, i’ve received every 2 days an email from amazon about new books, discounts, new items that I “should be interested” in. and that’s cheap for me.

You hit on something in your last paragraph that’s key … trust. As long as Amazon does nothing invasive or upsetting with your information, you will slowly build trust and incrementally allow them access to more and more personal information (up to a certain point). As long as their services improve in quality as you increase the information you provide, your trust and satisfaction builds.

The double-edged sword in all of this is that with the growing trust comes some degree of forgiveness for small mistakes, but any large infraction, like a misuse of personal info, will break the trust and potentially end the “relationship” that’s been built.

The greater the trust, the more careful a company needs to be with a user’s information.

With the decrease of processing costs personalization is no more reserved for luxury (5* hotels remembering your pillow tastes, requirements, majordomo remembering all you tastes, etc.)

But automation can only simplify the model of “personalization” which makes it… wrong.

But I believe that (auto)personalization is always accepted if:
- it does not exhibite your “secrets”. (Imagine your wife’s face seeing amazon.com homepage if you were browsing the website for the best book about divorce.) => So maybe a “close your eyes and do not record what I am doing the next session” would be great!
- it understands you can change: I love luxury food and fast food sometimes. So I want advertising about the best restaurants and sometimes about the new fast foods.
- it does not limit my view field: I am a man, so I do not want advertising about “menstruation solution”. Logic. But maybe I would be interested in that as my girlfriend has big issues with it. => I may be also interested by subjects that my social network like even if I never told you before.

Gotta say i have used them for over a year now and their strategy works really well. I guess we can all take a lession from them.

Only problem i have with it is the fact it has become so hard to log out that it causes a security risk

As a fairly frequent customer of Amazon, I find their automatic attempts at personalization amusing. I only use Amazon for limited kinds of information. As a result their so called personalization reflects the narrow window in which I deal with them. Like every other retailer - seller online, I only give them certain information knowing they will send tons and tons of junk I don’t even want to know about. So, I use email addresses that exist for the purposes of receiving retailer trash. I talk to Amazon when I want to talk with them, not vice versa.