What Amazon's Big Day Meant for the Rest of Us

That time when Amazon invented a holiday & in its 2nd year it was bigger than Black Friday & Cyber Monday? That was last week. https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/13/prime-day-2016-was-amazons-biggest-day-ever/

• Third-party Amazon sales weren't record-setting, per ChannelAdvisor
• Dozens (hundreds?) of other retailers scrambled to compete with their own promotions, a distraction from actual strategy 
• Amazon's most buzzed-about deals were for its own devices, like Alexa, that train customers to order more... from Amazon
• With scale, a new promotional holiday is easy to create, so let's focus on creating brands through what isn't -- stores, experience, differentiated assortments