Dentaltown August 2018 - 18

CH: What we've learned in all of Amazon's history is that if you delight your
customer, most of these other complications will sort themselves out. So everything
we do here is focused on: How do we delight the customer?
One of the customers we've really learned about in the dental space, and in
health care more broadly, is what we call "Mary the Millennial," which is just
a persona that we use to describe the new worker in health care. What we hear
from our customers and our suppliers alike is that it's getting harder and harder
to engage with Mary the Millennial through traditional channels, and that Mary
is expecting to be able to find what she wants in online channels, apps and on her
mobile phone, and if she can't find it there in a minute or less, she's just going to
choose something else. That's very much a guiding principle for us: If we make
Mary happy, the rest will take care of itself.

Chris Holt,
Leader of Global
Healthcare, Amazon

TG: So, in other words, if you get enough people in Amazon Business from
dental practices buying something through that channel-once you've got enough
of them plugged in-then you've got an audience that the manufacturers can't
ignore. Would that be a fair way to say that?
CH: Yes, what we hear from customers is they want to purchase more and more
on Amazon Business because they love the experience, the convenience and some
of the features that we've introduced. We think that creates an opportunity for
new suppliers to be there and be relevant. There are a lot of products out there
where maybe there's a traditional brand leader, but there are alternative products
that are just as good but haven't had as much exposure to customers. So there's
a big opportunity to redefine those "critical products" that a dental office needs.
Our goal is, simply, to provide all of the choices out there so that customers can
make an informed and transparent choice among all the options.
TG: There are basically two major categories of supplies-consumables and
equipment. Would it be practical for Amazon to sell large pieces of equipment, or
is that really just outside your strength of logistics and distributions and getting
things from A to B?
CH: It's a great question. We always start with our customers and experiment
and learn from them, but it might surprise you to know that we do have pieces
of capital equipment for sale on Amazon Business today that cost hundreds of
thousands of dollars. Now, we don't sell a lot of them yet, but what suppliers find
is that just making that product available on Amazon Business so that customers
can read about the product-understand and learn about the product, even if
they might not quite yet be comfortable making a $300,000 purchase of that
product on Amazon Business-that's a big marketing lift for the supplier to start
with that visibility.
Over time, customers will actually buy those things. So we let the marketplace
find its way, and we're always surprised by what our customers will do. That's why
we encourage suppliers to experiment with us-to make those kinds of capital
items available and see what happens.

18

AUGUST 2018 // dentaltown.com
http://www.dentaltown.com
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Dentaltown August 2018
