Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) stocks increase over 1.5% to trade at $103.94 in early session on Tuesday as in a campaign nicknamed “Project Ratatouille,” Amazon is attending farmers’ markets and spending more on TV commercials in an effort to win local customers and suppliers.
In March, the e-commerce behemoth attended a Paris farmers market for the first time to showcase its collaboration with local producers. As part of its effort to appeal to locals, it created an online store of French-made items in 2021.
The public relations campaign, now in its third year, is titled after the Disney film Ratatouille, which stars a Parisian rat who dreams of becoming a chef and ultimately befriends a young cook to prepare the renowned Provençal vegetable stew.
Bloomberg stated that the internet corporation’s marketers were “Frenchifying” Amazon through a variety of activities, including funding a research that found that eight out of ten employees would recommend working for the business.
Another study, funded by Amazon and conducted by Roland Berger, discovered that 84 percent of local shop owners in northeastern France claimed building one of the company’s warehouses near them had a neutral impact on their business.
To persuade more clients to purchase there, the company has produced a series of television commercials. Its Prime Video streaming service has gained the rights to France’s top football league, Ligue 1, in 2021.
The “Ratatouille” ad was inspired in part by McDonald’s efforts to rehabilitate its image in France in the 1990s by localizing its menu with products such as the McBaguette.
Amazon opened its first online store in France in 2000, where it now employs 20,000 people.
It has, however, had to deal with local concerns, including a series of strikes over compensation for its French employees.
During the pandemic, the tech company was asked to halt non-essential deliveries in April 2020 because to French lockdowns. The corporation was obliged to close its French warehouses and halt operations for five weeks.
Amazon got past this shift by providing one cent deliveries, but legislators established a €3 minimum shipping price for online book orders in 2021.
“For more than two decades, we’ve worked to earn our customers’ trust in France by contributing to their communities, providing good service, and offering a broad selection at low prices, even as the cost of living has escalated,” an Amazon spokesman told Bloomberg.
“Like many companies, we’ve always worked to share information about how we support the communities where we operate.”
