Amazon's spokesperson and how they deal with crisis

Instead of a normal spokesperson, Amazon has a program called Amazon Influencer Program and online Associates Program, which give social media users who have accounts with huge followers can become the company’s spokerspeople by reccomending Amazon’s products to their followers and get comission for each purchase. This is in fact a very innovative and effective way of choosing spokespeople. These “influencers” can be considered as both “celebrities” and “enthusiasts” spokepeople because they have both the ability to grab attention and make people beleive that their opinions are credible and authentic. It is rather hard to consider if these people are “official” or “unofficial” spokesperson of the brand, but I rather say they are unofficial because even though they get paid for the products they promote, they can register to be spokesperson on their own and what they post on social media channels are not controlled by the company.

However how many spokespeople the brand has, Amazon still facing a lot of crisis, as how corporations with too many management tentacles are. One of which was an incident when the company move gay, lesbian, transgendered and erotic books to the Adult section of the world’s largest bookstore. At first, they said it was a “ham-fisted” re-categorization error, which they intended to fix it and make it feel like a small mistake. However, Amazon had broken the plan itself by sending letters to publishers informing them of the move, which is not as easy to take back. With the rise of social media channels, even though the company tried to stop the presses from spreading the news, the tweets and posts about the incidents still went overboard. This case can be caused by a small group with negative attitude towards anything gay-related but the problems the company had to face were real and Amazon has left bad reputation with these books’ authors and audiences. In a same situation but different way of acting, Dominos, aggressively and quickly made sure the community saw their attitude toward the guys who caused the stupid mistake.

In the other hands, sometimes Amazon slow reaction came out in good result. Many people had heard of a New York Time story about a former Amazon’s employee providing the company’s “bruising workplace” fact, or we can say a “negative accidental spokesperson appeared. After the article had uproared on the Internet for 2 months, Amazon’s official spokesperson, Jay Carney, the former White House press secretary, on “CBS This Morning”, told another side of the story and accused that employee of seeking to defraud Amazon vendors. Although time reaction is important in Public Relation, this strategy of Amazon PR team was very clever by carefully gathered information and finally came up with a perfect fight-back story, which reach various stakeholders shortly.

When recognizing and planning for crisis rehearsal, the right strategies have to be built based on the root-cause of the problem analysis. The information that we convey to the public and stakeholders need to be clear and able to answer the core questions that everyone is looking for. It is not time reaction that is the most important strategy but choosing the right message and the right way to convey that message are the most important things to do.