Amazon Prime Day: An Important Shopping Day or Just Another Sale?
Today and tomorrow (July 16-17) mark the 2024 iteration of Amazon Prime Day, when Amazon offers all kinds of special deals, including on its own products and devices. As Amazon says, Prime Day is our “annual deal event… exclusively for Prime members, featuring two days of epic deals on top brands.”
This is the tenth straight year Amazon has held one of these special shopping events. Last year’s event generated $12.5B in sales, and this year’s event is expected to generate a whopping $14B.
But how long can the party continue? Will consumers eventually tire of these events? Will there eventually be Prime Day fatigue?
These are the kinds of questions marketers would love to ask the public. Typically, they use surveys and other traditional research instruments to gather public sentiment. However, as we’ve seen in political polls in recent years, survey results can be misleading or just plain wrong.
That’s where Thinkscape is different. Unlike surveys which collect individual responses and then aggregate the results, Thinkscape allows hundreds or even thousands of people to have a real-time interactive conversation. This means we can invite a cohort of the population to a Thinkscape session and get their collective sentiment on just about anything.
So with Prime Day upon us, we held a Thinkscape session and asked a group of 104 consumers if they consider Prime Day to be an important shopping day. The group logged on to the Thinkscape platform and discussed the question online. Their collective sentiment was a little surprising. Here is a video summary.
The group had low conviction (35%) that Amazon Prime Day is an important shopping day. On the contrary, they were quite cynical about Amazon’s $14 billion cash cow.
They actually view it mainly as a tactic to bait people into overspending through psychological tactics like FOMO and impulse buying. Some felt it boosts Amazon’s revenue with unnecssary purchases, while others saw it as no different from other sales, with prices not significantly better and not personally impactful.
Based on this result, one might wonder how long Amazon should keep running these events.
Want to see the full Thinkscape report on this question? Click this link, and we’ll send it to you.
