Last November, on the day before Black Friday, Amazon.com was featured on 60 Minutes discussing the use of drone technology to deliver merchandise to customers within 30 minutes. Since this technology has not been approved by the FAA, and viewers were informed that it was “years away”, this was an obvious marketing ploy. And it worked – Amazon’s sales that weekend hit record highs.

In August of this year, Morgan-James Publishing released Greg Jameson’s book, “Amazon’s Dirty Little Secrets”. The underlying message is the book is that small businesses should follow Amazon’s marketing techniques and apply them to their own businesses. This past weekend I was giving a presentation to a group of ecommerce business owners about my book. In the book I pose the question, what would Jeff do? I joked that these small businesses should start using drones to deliver their merchandise. What the book really teaches you is not to ship via drone, but to “use the power of others to market and sell for you.”

Well, if Amazon can use drones as a promotional tool, and the premise of the book is to follow Amazon’s example of how they market, I decided to capitalize on their publicity stunt. Along with my colleague Joel Comm, I produced a video showing “Amazon” delivering my book to Joel using a drone.

The video can be view on YouTube at:

What can you do to capitalize on current events for your business?

Greg Jameson