Aubeyzon, PacoBrown, Kenny Mui, William Perez, JasmineRubalcava, Miguel

Amazon is one of the worlds leading companies of the online retail industry. Amazon provides products and services that present value to their customers while maintaining a prestigious image surrounded by innovation. Information in todays world is seen, as being very valuable, from a common conversation with a friend to an interview with a potential employer, as the saying goes knowledge is power. Amazon has made it much easier for customers to increase their knowledge and power through the new innovative device we know as the Kindle. The Kindle is a small revolutionary device that allows readers to store up to 1500 e-books for their reading pleasure. This allows its customers to go online and buy books at a much lower price ($9.99) and be able to take their purchases everywhere in this lightweight portable e-book reader. Amazon will back up anything over the 1500 in their digital library for easy re-access to books one has purchased in the past. This huge availability of information is an ongoing trend and Amazon is most certainly running with this idea and exploiting it to the highest potential possible with this device. Great part of Amazons success in the e-book industry is their solid positioning and strategies being implemented. One-way Amazon has learned how to position itself to hold a competitive advantage towards their competitors is using Porters generic strategies. These strategies help visualize where a company stands in the industry. These strategies include cost leadership, product differentiation, and focus strategy. These three components are matched to either a narrow or broad market, to better calculate the risk and advantages depending on the size of the market.A charting/value curve is also important to compare old strategies to new ones. It also serves to compare the strategies taken from a competitor in order to see where the competitive advantage is at; whether its price, technology, customer service or innovationMission:We seek to be Earths most customer-centric company. We seek to provide a variety of unique, low cost, and innovative products. Our products are developed to empower the consumers, with the most dominant product in the industry. Vision:We seek to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.Generic Strategy The generic Strategy for Amazon and the Kindle consists of three main parts. First of all and most importantly, we are focusing almost 100% on innovation. However we are focusing both in product and company innovation. The reason we are focusing so much on innovation is because we want to continue to constantly improve both our product and company therefore making our products and services more appealing to our customers.The second part of our generic strategy is that we want to make sure we lower our price for the kindle. We think it would be appropriate to lower the price down to 99 dollars so that it can compete with brands such as the Ipad.Finally the last part of our generic strategy focuses on customer service. We are not giving much importance to customer service, because we feel as if it is not necessary to have a good customer service in order to have a successful product.

The Diagram below indicates the strategy we feel best represents Amazon and the kindles strategy to be the leader in the e-book industry as well as to achieve its mission and vision.

Low CostCustomer ServiceInnovation

The diagram below indicates the strategy we feel that does not represent Amazon and the kindles strategy, however it doesnt mean it could work for another company such as Sony.

Low CostCustomer ServiceInnovation

Charting/Value Curve

The above diagram shows the first chart/value curve that we had done based on the current kindle. After strategizing and re-evaluating the aspects that we could improve on to stay ahead of our competitors, we came up with a new chart/value curve (Diagram below).

Being the first e-reader to be put out and having that brand identity and with the improvements we look forward to a greater demand for the Kindle allowing our prices to be dropped due the mass production needed of the device. We also want to improve our web access by making it more efficient and effective by improving the speed of wireless on the Kindle. Not only would customers appreciate faster Internet but e-book availability as well. We hope to build relationships with more publishers to gain access to a wider variety of e-books. With the vast amount of e-books we hope to acquire, we plan on improving our storage space to be able to withstand the capacity that we soon will have. A major setback for the Kindle is that Sony our competitor has a great amount of features that consumers take interest in. Our strategy is to improve our features by adding color so that consumers can have a differentiation to choose from. Also add a light so that its easier to read for those who enjoy doing so by the bedside or even in places that there is a lack of brightness. An important feature that we also will improve on is the text-to-speech by making it sound more human like and less robotic like, also having the option to be read in a female or males voice. We also plan on expanding on language barriers where one could read in their preferred language. This will definitely bring in a wider target market all over the world. Last is the ease of use. We feel that adding a touch screen will definitely simplify the device where it could be easier to highlight, get from one chapter to another, or even hide the keyboard when not in use.

Balanced Scorecard

The balanced scorecard is a tool that enables managers to measure vision and strategy against business and operating unit level performance. The balanced scorecard gives us a clear understanding of the strategies presented and the steps needed in order to achieve that goal. We will be analyzing the Financial, Internal Business Process, External, and Learning and Growth perspectives for the Amazon Kindle e-reader.

To succeed financially, how should we appear to our share-holders?Financial

ObjectivesMeasuresTargetsInitiatives

Lower Cost-10% of MarketRanked #1Eliminate Wastes, partnership with manufacturers

Increase Market ShareRetail Actual60%Market Awareness

Competitive DeviceImprove deviceColor Touch screenBetter TechnologyHire More People, add new product features

To satisfy our shareholders and customers, at what business processes must we excel?External Business Process

ObjectivesMeasuresTargetsInitiatives

Brand AwarenessMarket Share60%Advertise in different media

-Retain old customers-Attract New# of customers5%-Customer benefits- Loyalty prices

-Product Expansion-Complementors- Larger Library- Language expansion

- 2 languages- 10% more eBooks-Partnerships-Customer feedback

To satisfy our shareholders and customers, at what business processes must we excel?Internal Business Process

ObjectivesMeasuresTargetsInitiatives

Lower Production CostAmount saved4%Cheap contract with manufacturers

Lower Distribution CostProfit Pool4%Reduce Value Chain

Increase IT for better site navigation# of site hits, customer feedbackFaster site, improved site securityIT Seminars, employee training

To achieve our vision, how will we sustain our ability change and improve?Learning and Growth

ObjectivesMeasuresTargetsInitiatives

Improve Customer ServiceEmployees train100% satisfaction- Teach employees manners- Staff training

Adopt new TechnologyAmount of technology implementedPer yearImprove hardware and software

FinancialThe financial perspective of the balanced scorecard involves strategies for growth, profitability, and risk when viewed from the shareholder or owners perspective. In this case for the Amazon Kindle, our financial objectives are to lower the cost of the Amazon Kindle from the current price of $259.00 6 Kindle, and $489.00 9.7 Kindle DX. We will measure this by setting the price of the Kindle according to the market price of similar eReader devices such as the Sony eReader. We plan on marking down the Kindle by no more than 10% of its current price. Our target is to be the number 1 product, where consumers will be able to afford and purchase the Kindle instead of the other devices in the market. With the Apple iPad available on the market, key pricing would be the best way to counter attack our competitors. Our initiative in offering a lower cost is to eliminate possible wastes of materials, and possible partnerships with manufacturers.Another financial objective is to increase/retain our market share of 60% in the eReader industry. It is important that we retain our market share since we have new products emerging such as the Apple iPad, which will strongly influence the eReader industry. We will measure our market share by the actual numbers in the eReader industry. Our initiative in increasing/retaining our market share is by market awareness such as marketing. We will advertise more through media advertisements. Television ads are very powerful especially to grab the consumers attention and focus them away from their competitors.Our last financial objective is to have a competitive device. We would like to improve the Kindle by adding new features such as color, touch screen, and etc. In order for us to compete in the changing eReader market place, we have to incorporate new technology. How will we do this? Well we will need invest in the new technology, and hire engineers to improve the Kindle device.

ExternalThe external scorecard is all about the customers. In order to fulfill this card the strategies need to be geared toward customer satisfaction, and that is given them more choices to pick from. There are three main strategies that will ensure customer satisfaction, which will contribute greatly in all four aspects of our strategies.The first is brand awareness. We want to keep increasing brand awareness on the kindle and the coming new version to continue the hype and talk that has been created with the ipad and other new entrants. To measure this we will see if our percentage of market share has increased. As of now we have 60% of the market share on e-reader sales, and we want to keep dominating if not increase that percentage. In order to do this we will spend more on advertising costs in different media, like in technology websites and magazines, newspaper and even TV ads.The second strategy is to attract new customers and retain the old. To see if our team has accomplished this difficult task, we will see if the numbers of users online have increased. Our specific target for the end of the year would be an increase of 5%. In order to accomplish this strategy we will give customer benefits and loyalty prices. These include discounts for purchasing various e-books, discounts for being a member, free e-books for doing filling out surveys, and free e-books of gift cards for recommending a friend. These benefits increase customer satisfaction and make them happy which allows us to sell more products. For loyalty prices, we will be giving plenty of discounts to returning customers, or customers that have been with us since the beginning. This will help us retain the old, while attracting new ones with out new benefit programs.The last task is to bring up a larger selection of products for our users. This means expanding our online library, not only by presenting more e-books to people, but also expand the language barrier into Spanish, French and German. This will not only extend our kindles and library to other continents but also expand on our customer base. To present more variety to our American based customers, we want to offer different kindles with different options. The bad side of this is the increase in production costs. Some of the changes that could happen are an availability of different colors; touch screen, and adding color to the screen. To accomplish this we will need several partnerships with our manufacturers and publishers. Forming reliable partnerships with these will allow us to increase the number of e-books in our library, and expand to different languages. Internal Business ProcessThe internal business process perspective reflects strategic priorities among processes according to their contributions to customer and shareholder satisfaction. In order to satisfy our customers and shareholders, we must lower our production costs. This means we will have to form partnerships or get cheaper contracts with the manufacturers and suppliers. We will measure this by our quarter end/year end financial overview. Realistically speaking, we hope to lower production cost by at least 5%.With lower production cost, we can also try to lower distribution cost. We will measure lower distribution costs through the profit pool, and we aim to lower distribution costs at least 5%. According to the profit pool diagram we constructed, distribution costs are the second highest after retail. We aim to increase profitability in retailing the Kindle. Our last internal business process objective is to increase IT for better site navigation. Our target is to improve site security, prevent web attacks, security flaws and to provide our users a faster site. We will host online seminars to empower and educate our employees, as well as live customer support. This is similar to the genius bar we will find at the Apple store, but only youre in a virtual environment. Our measures will be based upon the number of website visits, and customer feedback.

Learning and GrowthLearning and growth is all about strategizing and implementing objectives to better our management and employees. Teaching, training and enabling our employees to be aware of how the company operates and generates revenue and value will better the overall company. To do this we had two main objectives. Improving customer service by training our employees on manners and customer relationship will let the company have a better image. We are looking for 100% customer satisfaction, which is not an easy target, but a possible one.Secondly we will adopt new technology. Adopting new technology is looking for better and faster ways to work our website engine and improve customer experience in the site. To do this better hardware is needed in order to perform at an optimum pace.