Repositioning the Amazon Kindle Fire

¶ … Repositioning the Amazon Kindle Fire HD

The introduction and rapid ascent of e-book readers is revolutionizing the e-book, tablet PC, smartphone and laptop PC market by making content that had been locked between the covers of books free to be digitally read anywhere. The Amazon Kindle Fire HD is one of my favorite electronic devices because it's possible to carry around hundreds of books in its 20 oz. format. The data plan on the Amazon Kindle Fire HD is significantly less than those offered on the Apple iPad2 Series, which makes this an ideal device for those who are in school, or travel often for their jobs. I've found the Kindle Fire HD to have excellent battery life, durability, and is perfect for gathering research on school projects using its browser and support for Wi-Fi. The intent of this analysis is to define a marketing plan and tagline for the Amazon Kindle Fire HD.

Proposed Marketing Plan for the Amazon Kindle Fire HD

The Amazon Kindle Fire HD is designed to support active lifestyles of people who love to read, are students, or want to consume a large amount of digital content including movies and textual data. Amazon's approach to defining the Amazon Kindle Fire HD is heavily dependent on how the company is marketing its ebooks and digital content sold on the Kindle store website (Hageman, 2012). There is a perception that the Kindle Fire HD is designed only for Amazon-generated content in certain demographic segments, which is an issue that the company needs to confront and overcome in its marketing strategies (Tian, Martin, 2011). There are also large variations in how specific customer groups perceive the Amazon Kindle Fire HD and its value with many still seeing it just as a color-screen-based e-reader (Kastner, Stangl, 2012).

The proposed plan to overcome these communication and marketing challenges is defined in the following strategy. First, Amazon needs to humanize this device more and open up a Youtube contest to get their customers across each customer segment to produce a story of how they use their Kindle Fire HDs. Not only is this great research into how their customers are using their devices, it provides a wealth of digital content they can use for advertising and promotion. Second, the insights shared by customers and the most interesting stories can become the basis of a new campaign. Every video produced by customers will be uploaded to a special site so customers get to also "own" the campaign. Third, the marketing campaign will also show how ebooks, videos, and digital content from literally anywhere can be used on the Kindle Fire HD. This is to show that the device is much more egalitarian than it is perceived to be (Kastner, Stangl, 2012). Fourth, the campaign needs to also concentrate on those who produce digital content as well, as this is a major part of any business model focused on ebooks (Tian, Martin, 2011). This element of the marketing strategy needs to show how any author can be published on the Kindle in literally hours after the content is produced and prepared. This strategy will unify the digital content consumers and producers equally as a result. Each of these steps of the strategy are digitally-oriented as well, making them easily measured over time.