Waterstones dance with the 'devil' for a second time

It was reported today that UK book retailer Waterstones will do a tie-up with Amazon and sell the Kindle, which many pundits have described as, 'letting the fox in to the chicken coop'. Indeed Waterstones managing director, James Daunt has previously called Amazon "the devil" but presumably he has overcome his prejudices.

But what all the media coverage has missed is that Waterstones has previously done a deal with Amazon. I had a ringside seat to the first deal as the agency I founded in the 90's, Beechwood (and sold to US group Hawkeye in 2000) handled the Waterstones advertising for many years. 

When ecommerce was just taking off in the late 90's and before the dotcom bubble burst, Waterstones chose to do a deal with Amazon to run their website and fulfill their ecommerce function. At the agency we thought it seemed bonkers and counselled against it, as we felt it was, (yes you guessed it), 'letting the fox in to the chicken coop'. By the time Waterstones took back the running of their website years later the damage was done and they have been playing catch-up ever since; even today their online offering remains poor.

In a marketing world which is fast becoming dominated by 'big data', Waterstones are just about to give away a whole bunch of it and it's exactly what they gave away once before;  this time it's an intimate understanding of the Waterstones consumer through Kindle data, which a bricks and mortar retailer can never hope to gather.

The deal didn't work first time round and it won't the second.