Buy Now

How Amazon combined branding and relationship marketing with massive distribution infrastructure to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy.

Amazon is ubiquitous in our daily lives—we stream movies and television on Amazon Prime Video, converse with Alexa, receive messages on our smartphone about the progress of our latest orders. In Buy Now, Emily West examines Amazon’s consumer-facing services to investigate how Amazon as a brand grew so quickly and inserted itself into so many aspects of our lives even as it faded into the background, becoming a sort of infrastructure that can be taken for granted. Amazon promotes the comfort and care of its customers (but not its workers) to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy. 
 
West shows how Amazon has cultivated personalized, intimate relationships with consumers that normalize its outsized influence on our selves and our communities. She describes the brand’s focus on speedy and seamless ecommerce delivery, represented in the materiality of the branded brown box; the positioning of its book retailing, media streaming, and smart speakers as services rather than sales; and the brand’s image control strategies. West considers why pushback against Amazon’s ubiquity and market power has come mainly from among Amazon’s workers rather than its customers or competitors, arguing that Amazon’s brand logic fragments consumers as a political bloc. West’s innovative account, the first to examine Amazon from a critical media studies perspective, offers a cautionary cultural study of bigness in today’s economy.
 Figure List ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Buy Now--The Branding of Convenience 1
I Distribution 27
1 A New Kind of Distribution Brand 29
2 The Box: Distribution Fetishism and the Materialities of Ecommerce 51
II Culture 81
3 From Bookseller to Behemoth: The Platformization of Retail 83
4 Speak for Service: Alexa, Surveillance, and Automated Intimacy 107
5 Watch Now: Ubiquitous Media and the Commoditization of Culture 139
III Image 169
6 Amazon.Amazon: Normalizing Monopoly 171
7 American Ubiquity: Amazon's Platform Imperialism 195
Conclusion: Confronting the Costs of Convenience 219“West brilliantly documents how the global master of one-click shopping, ubiquitous surveillance, and monopoly power became a serious threat to democracy, the climate, and a humane workplace.”
—Vincent Mosco, author of The Smart City in a Digital World
 
“How did Amazon get to its high perch of digital retailing, and how does it stay there? In interrogating this question through a number of insightful lenses, Emily West’s Buy Now raises fundamental issues about commerce and consumer politics in the twenty-first century.” 
—Joseph Turow, author of The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet
 
“Buy Now is an indispensable resource for thinking through, struggling with, and questioning our relationships with Amazon. West provides an astute and urgent analysis about how the ecommerce site has subtly pervaded our everyday lives in the past twenty-five years—and how big tech attempts to shape our collective futures.”
—Sarah Banet-Weiser, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania and University of Southern California; author of Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand CultureEmily West is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture.