The Advertising Technique Behind The Amazon Kindle’s Success

What do Hilary Clinton, Stephen King, Oprah Winfrey and Arnold Schwarzenegger have in common? Apart from the ability to scare you on occasion that is. The answer is that all of them have, at different times and in different ways, provided good publicity for Amazon’s Kindle reader.

Oprah was a fairly early adopter. As long ago as 2008 she announced that the original Kindle was her “favorite new gadget”. She also interviewed Amazon founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, on her show and gave the Kindle a glowing testimonial. It was a real shot in the arm for Amazon.

Worl best selling author, Stephen King, penned a special novella – “Ur” – to commemorate the release of Amazon’s second generation reader, the Kindle 2, in February 2009. Without giving the story away, the plot was centred of the Kindle itself and what happened when an English teacher bought a Kindle for himself after breaking up with his girlfriend. King read extracts from the book live on stage at the official launch of the Kindle 2. More good publicity for Amazon.

As Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger initiated a program to make free digital textbooks available in Californian schools. The program, which has several stages, commenced in August of 2009. It seemed that, at least as far as electronic textbooks were concerned, the future had arrived somewhat faster than many people had anticipated. At the end of the day, if Arnie says that they’re a good idea who’s going to tell him he’s wrong?

Also on the subject of education, the New Democratic Leadership Council, a Washington think-tank of which Hilary Clinton is a member, released a white paper entitled “A Kindle In Every Backpack”. The paper outlined the benefits of introducing electronic books and e-book readers into the American system of education. Although the report did acknowledge that other devices could be employed the fact that the Kindle was referenced throughout the document, and even included in the title, was fantastic publicity for Amazon.

These are just four examples of the kind of exposure the Kindle reader has managed to achieve. Over the course of 2009, the Kindle attracted a great deal of publicity, mainly for itself but also for e-book readers as a whole. It’s easy to see how the Kindle has managed to achieve a 60% share of the U.S. e-book reader market.

Currently there is no shortage of companies with their own e-book readers on the market. Although some of these boast technical specs which, in some areas at least, outperforms Amazon’s Kindle, there just doesn’t seem to be the same buzz about any of them that existed, and to a large extent still exists, around the Kindle. It really is difficult to imagine where the Kindle Killer is going to come from – unless Amazon release the Kindle 4 that is.