What Service Designers Need to Know About Amazon Dash
By now, everyone knows about the Amazon Dash button. This little sticky piece of wi-fi hardware can be attached to any surface enabling one-touch shopping. If you run out of Tide (the poster child of Dash) you press the button and it will be delivered to you. Ditto coffee, batteries and trash bags. It’s a cute idea and one that is easily dismissed as a gimmick. But let’s take a look at what it means to service design.
Yes, it looks like it fell out of a box of Cornflakes. And no, we can’t imagine a line of Dash buttons stuck to the outside of the fridge like a badly arranged desktop. But by ignoring its power we are failing to see that we need to design what comes next. Because customers may not be falling over themselves to pay for a button, but businesses are.
Brands such as Tide are currently funding the button’s rollout by providing it for free — against the future purchase of their detergent. And at $5 a pop that is a serious per-customer facilitation fee. How many boxes of Tide do they need to sell to see a healthy ROI?
“Customers who shop at Amazon do so because they can filter their choices according to price.”
I don’t know, but I do know why they’re willing to invest. Amazon is the number one online marketplace. And although they offer big brands sponsored spots at the top of the list, they also offer a ‘lowest price first’ option. Customers who shop at Amazon do so because they can filter their choices according to price. Unlike visiting a conventional store, brands can’t jump into their carts by ensuring they have the best advertising, packaging and placement.
For this reason, many big brands secretly despise Amazon. Just the same way the commercial airline giants shudder every time they see a flight price comparison advert. They have to be on there, but they know the platform encourages customers to buy based on price alone. This turns their well-developed product into a basic commodity.
The Amazon Dash completely changes this. It’s a relationship builder that rearranges the customer-brand dynamic. Firstly, it simplifies the customer journey, offering more convenience, while at the same time, generating repeat business for the brand. It also reestablished trust between Amazon and the brand, encouraging partnership.
They’re so great, I can almost imagine receiving various unsolicited Dash buttons through the post as we did with AOL CDs in the nineties. And while we laugh about those CDs now, they got us online and generated a demand, which had changed the world. As service designers, one thing we hear again and again is, service design should augment the potential to act. And undeniably, Dash buttons do this.
“The Amazon Dash button is a call to action for us. It tells us what will be expected of service design in the future.”
So the question is — as always — what’s coming next? How can we design the products and services of the future, which will prompt customers to purchase our client’s brands and not go comparison-shopping? The Amazon Dash button is a call to action for us. It tells us what will be expected of service design in the future. Because we all use a hundred different products in our homes but we’re not going to sick logoed Dash buttons to every device we own… So let’s get thinking.
