The Secret Behind High-Converting Amazon Hero Images

The Secret Behind High-Converting Amazon Hero Images Speaker 2: A good hero image is one that can stand alone. You can almost not have a product detail page and if your main hero image is good enough to sell from that image, that's a good hero image. Speaker 1: What do you feel about 3D renderings? Speaker 2: Is your packaging compelling? If it's not, you have to rely on post edits. What can you do around that image that's going to make it compelling? Speaker 1: We've got a million different photographers out there charging very diverse price range. Unknown Speaker: What do you look for? Speaker 1: What questions do you ask that photographer? Speaker 2: Stop making people work hard to understand why they should buy your product. Speaker 1: Your image might be amazing, but if your hero image isn't stopping the scroll, none of this matters. The competition is fierce and your customers are making snap decisions in seconds. So how do you create an image that demands attention? Well today we're breaking down the secrets of high converting hero images, the power of split testing, and how to make small tweaks that can lead to massive sales. Okay, our guest today is a leading expert in Amazon creative and merchandising strategies. He's a brand evangelist for PickFu. He helps brands leverage consumer insights to optimize their creative for better engagement and conversions. With years of experience analyzing thousands of ASINs while working with ad agencies, he knows exactly what works, what doesn't on Amazon. And just in a second, we'll be bringing on John Aspinall. But before we do that, let's have a word from our sponsor. Tired of negative reviews dragging down your star rating in sales? TraceFuse has your back. Traceview specializes in removing non-compliant Amazon reviews the right way. I'm talking 100% compliant with Amazon Terms of Service. And with over 11,000 reviews removed for 400 plus brands, they know what it takes to protect your reputation and boost conversions. And here's the best part. You only pay for performance. That means you only pay for reviews they successfully remove. No contracts, no monthly fees, just results. Plus, as a Lunch With Norm listener, you get two reviews removed for free. Ready to clean up your reviews? Visit TraceFuse.ai. That's TraceFuse, T-R-A-C-E-F-U-S-E dot A-I. A lot of people just slap up an image and really don't think about it. They'll go to the cheapest photographer that looks okay to them and they're wondering why they're not getting results. So let's why don't we just start right at the at the beginning with you know, how do you even think about Creating that hero image, what do you gotta look for? Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think it's almost, if you're getting like super granular with it and you really wanna do it right, it comes down to your packaging. Now, you can have okay packaging for your product and then do a lot of post edits onto it. You know, 30 day supply, sugar free, this, that, and a third. But you still won't have as good if you have really good packaging. So I think that's the first step a lot of people kind of toss to the side. Even in 2025 you're still seeing in the space very commoditized Me Too kind of products. I don't know how. I don't know how someone can think in today's day and age, you know, let me go to Alibaba and pick up a can opener and slap my logo on it and I'm going to make millions. That's really hard to do. Maybe Five to eight years ago that that market was kind of open But China direct on amazon.com is a real thing so if you're sourcing something from China nine out of ten times that manufacturer is going to be selling it themselves on Amazon, so I The way to really beat the market with that is branding. And so many people leave that to the side where it's just like, oh, I see in Helium 10 or Jungle Scout or whatever gamut of tools you're using for data, this one's crushing it. I want to do that too. Well, first, is it crushing it? You can't really see. You see the velocity of sales, but you don't know how much ad spend is put behind that. You don't know what kind of ACOS or Tacos is over there. There could be people out there with loss leaders that are making money on the back end with something else, another product. So I wouldn't look at it from a high level of if this is doing well. I always tell folks, what are you passionate about? Start there. Start there. What do you like in your life? Because the reason is you're more likely to care about it. So if I was actually going to get into selling on Amazon and I was getting into, I don't know, I'm not a big fishing guy. If I wanted to sell fishing lures, I really wouldn't be that passionate about it. I'd be like, yeah, this is a hook, that's a fish, here's some line. But for someone that's really passionate about it, they're going to go down the rabbit hole, no, you need to have this certain angle of the hook and you have to, you know, the lure has to be this and they're really going to fine tune that product. When it comes to the packaging and the main image and all that kind of stuff, it stems from there, right? So is your packaging compelling? If it's not, you have to rely on post edits. What can you do around that image that's going to make it compelling? And I always tell people, look at the SERP. If you're looking directly at the product, so search on the result page for anyone listening. I always have to, I rattle off these acronyms and stuff like that and I forget. So if you're looking at just the product, you're in a vacuum and you're like, okay, I'm super zoomed in. I see that it says, you know, you know, cod liver oil, capsules, whatever. Oh, it's great. It's perfect. It says all this kind of stuff. But when you zoom out, And that image is very, very small, the size on the search engine result page. And it's also next to a million other of the same things. Is it compelling? And that's one thing that we show folks with PickFu. When I came on board, there has been a click test here, which is like a heat map test, which is traditionally for like packaging, where you would show it and say, hey, click on the package where it resonates with you the most. And people would click and you would see. But I thought, wouldn't this be cool if you just took a screenshot of the search engine result page and said, hey, folks shopping on Amazon, you're searching for cod liver oil, whatever. Where's the first place you're clicking? And now that's the SERP click test that we have baked out in PICFU as a template, where you can just upload a screenshot of the SERP and really get actionable data. Because there's two things, right? There's data and there's actionable data. Data is good, but if it's not actionable, what are you going to do with it? You know, you really have to understand, okay, I'm clicking here because I like that it's bright red and says cob liver. Or I like here because it shows the products outside the packaging. So I think it's really like a balance between certain elements. Like, you can do too much. Oh, Norm, you could do too much. I've seen listings on Amazon where it's, you know, they want them on a white background. I can't even see a white background. They have so many post edits inside of it. And it's just like, what am I buying? Like, I have no idea. But there's, There's the Wild West on Amazon, and there's the No-Fly Zone. That's what I've coined it, right? Wild West? Supplements. Supplements, pet products. You can do pretty much near everything in the hero image. You could show a dog. You could show a dog jumping. You could show, you know, the pills. You could show a splash of water behind. You could show anything you want in there, and it's okay. But if you're in certain no-fly zone categories like books, media, shoes, forget it. Shoes, if you, I've learned from brands over the years, don't even think about showing a box behind some shoes in the shoe category. That will not happen. You have to show shoes at a certain angle. Sometimes you can only show one shoe. And then most apparel is going to be in that no-fly zone because Historically, with apparel, it's on the model and most apparel doesn't really have anything you could add to it that's going to enhance the customer shopper experience. And that's like the big rule of thumb. Whenever you add something to your main hero image, is it aiding in the customer journey? Yes or no? If it's no, don't even do it. I see too many times where people put like random things. I've actually seen recently someone put bestseller, choice seller, like one of those cheesy kind of Canva. I love Canva, big Canva guy. But one of those cheesy Canva kind of like stamp or icons on it and it got through on a paid ad. I was like, is Amazon asleep at the wheel? Are they allowing that? But yeah, I really think that understanding the fundamentals of what your packaging looks like, how you stand out on the SERP, what are you showing, right? To me, a good hero image is one that can stand alone, right? You could almost not have a product detail page. And if your main hero image is good enough to sell from that image, that's a good hero image. If I have to click on it to go, hmm, learn more and be like, wait, how many servings is it? What flavor is it? Is this going to work for me? In my eyes, that's not a good hero image. Speaker 1: There's probably a lot of listeners, especially if they're newer, they're trying to save money. And usually we're not pitching a service, but there is an app out there. There's a few companies like PickFu, but PickFu is probably one of the best ones out there. And if you're not using a service like this, basically it's a very inexpensive focus group, you're hurting yourself. There's a time to spend money and a time not to spend money. This is one of those times where You can give that image to a group of people and they can give you some honest feedback for a very, very low price. I'm not sure about you, John, but when you put up that image and you could do this with all sorts of images, but with that hero images, what are some of the things that you should be asking that focus group? What are some of the questions that bring out the best results? Subscribe and leave a comment saying I subscribed and I'll personally reply to your comment. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a good question that a lot of PickFu users tend to struggle with. And we make it easy because we put in some pre-canned kind of messages. So, you know, if you're testing your hero image, what are you testing it against? Are you testing it against other iterations of your own hero image to see what's best? Are you testing it against competition? Are you testing it against, you know what I'm saying? So it depends what exactly you're testing at, but the question is, what I always go with, if you're shopping on Amazon for, insert your main search term that you want to rank for, because that's where we're compelling and putting in front of the people, which of these would compel you to click to learn more and why? That's what I typically go with, right? I don't really run with, you know, do you like the fruit or do you like the one without the fruit? I'm not an attorney or never went to legal school or anything like that, but to me, it's almost leading the witness because if you're saying, do you like it with the fruit or without the fruit, then I'm automatically looking at the fruit in the picture. I'm not looking at the real experience of what I, you know, I want to go into it with a clear mind and fresh eyes and really just say, which one would I go with? It's interesting you brought that up because that's what a lot of folks say too is like, I don't want to spend the money. I'm not going to sit here and pitch PICFU, but at the end of the day, if anyone has a Norm, I don't know if you have one near you. I'm in New York City. They're everywhere. It's a store called Five Below. Have you ever heard of that store? Speaker 1: No. Speaker 2: So Five Below, if anyone's listening, for anyone that's listening rather, that knows Five Below, you know what I'm talking about. Five Below is basically a store that everything in there is $5 or less. But when you go in, you see brand name items and you're like, this is amazing. You'll see Hasbro toys, Mattel toys, Disney, like brand name stuff. And you're like, five bucks for this? It's amazing. But when you really kind of look and lean in and you start to look at the shelves, You start to see that it's, okay, that's the Guardians of the Galaxy figure that I saw in Walmart or Target for 20 bucks. Why is it $5? When you go in further, you realize all the boxes on that shelf are the same character and it's the very obscure character in the movie that no one really cares about because what happens was It didn't do well at Walmart or Target or another big box, you know, brick-and-mortar store, and then it had to get liquidated for pennies on the dollar. So then it goes to Five Below. And the reason I'm saying this is I call Five Below bad decision warehouse. And when I say bad decision warehouse, it's painful because when you go in there and you start to realize it, all these big, big brand name manufacturers, this is where their bad choices ended up, right? They were supposed to sell on Target or Walmart or Amazon or anything else like that and they ended up here because they didn't do good enough testing with their country. I say good enough because they might have done some or maybe they have a license with Disney and the license requires them to run all the characters in the movie or something like that. But you could even see this in Dollar Tree. I think most folks have a Dollar Tree near them. If you go in Dollar Tree, nine out of 10 times, when you first walk in Dollar Tree, there's a pallet in the front, usually of drinks or anything like that. Last time I was in Dollar Tree, it was Rockstar Energy, a big brand name for energy drinks. But the flavor that was there was the weirdest flavor I've ever heard of. I think it was like coffee, mango, something. And it was just like it was being liquidated because they could not sell that in the traditional brick and mortar outlet. And it just went the way of bad decision warehouses, which is the dollar tree for brand name items or five below. So imagine How painful that is for those big, big companies, we're talking like hundreds of thousands of dollars of a mistake, right, of a bad choice. So when it comes to your Amazon business and your product you're launching, $200 at PickFu, it seems unnecessary. It's almost like if you're renting a car and they say, do you want to get the $3 insurance? Nah, I'm good. Nah, I'm good. You may be good, or you may not, right? But at the end of the day, if something does happen, wouldn't you have rather just check that box and say, not a big deal? Because when you're bringing over a container, especially from overseas, a 20-foot container of a bad decision, it's super painful. Because then what are you gonna have to do? You're either gonna have to let it sit there, rack up long-term storage fees, you're gonna have to liquidate it at a loss, or you're gonna have to retract it and pay for all that to come back to do what with? So, I think it's like I get what you're saying and that mindset of what potentially people might be thinking is the case and that's kind of what I talk about all the time where it's like, okay, $200 or $300 now or $20,000 or $30,000 later. What's more painful? Speaker 1: You know, I'm going to go down a different rabbit hole right now, kind of on the same topic and you can definitely use this on the hero image. But like I think it was a few weeks ago I had Vanessa hung on and we were talking about the algorithm and we were talking about Rufus and Cosmo, but we went down a different path on some things. This one for PICFU I think would be, I just thought of it while you were talking, asking people what they see in the image. So, if you've got a lifestyle image or if you've got your feature benefits images, there's so many people that they're not letting ChatGPT or any of these apps actually tell them what the algorithm is seeing and they're missing the point. So, the image isn't getting picked up. I think this is another category that PickFu could probably use is, okay, people, what do you see in the image? Yeah, what does it represent? And I'm surprised when I'm throwing in images. And all of a sudden, I see something completely different. Speaker 2: It takes you off where it's like, wait a minute, I came here for this. And is this not the vibe that I was like, if you click on something that's, let's say, a multivitamin for men, right? And then all of a sudden, you see an image of a kid sitting at school, like, wait, what? I thought this was for me, like what? Or you or they're talking about something that's for a traveler. But then you see a guy sitting home at the couch. So, I think it's important, right, to resonate with the actual shopper, but also as AI advances. Side note, we have a one-year-old Bernadoodle dog we got probably about six months ago. His name is Cosmo. No relation to Amazon being named Cosmo, but every time I yell it now, I automatically think of Amazon, Cosmo, and Rufus, and I'm like, man. But it's important because AI is at the point now where if you load an image into ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, DeepSeek, you name it for whatever tool, it can tell you what's in the image. And Amazon's algo with Rufus and Cosmo and that whole deal, Amazon is very Apple-like. Meaning they already have the tools, the features, everything they're going to roll out for the next two to three years already ready to rock and roll. And they're just slowly rolling it out. So I don't think it's... We're going to happen soon. I think it already happened. And it's just a matter of time before they start to say, yep, we're reading the images. And this is something I tell folks all the time to prepare yourself for when that happens. Because if you have, let's say, let's say chocolate chip cookies, let's say you sell the world's best chocolate chip cookies, but your packaging is just saying, John's cookies, and then a picture of me and then some chocolate chip cookies and very, very small, it'll say chocolate chip cookies. That might not read as clearly as if you were to say chocolate chip cookies and then my brand took a little bit of a backseat to the actual product and what it is because a lot of people don't realize that's going to be good for AI as it rolls out, but that's also better customer servicing and experience because if I go to Amazon for a problem, There's two things I'm going to go to Amazon for, something I need or something I want, right? Those are the two things that I always tell people when you're developing a product, try and make it a need item, not a want item. Because if my pockets get real thin, the first thing that's going to go is the want items. I want it, but I'm not, I don't need it. When it's a need item, it's a problem. I need it. I got to buy it. I don't care. I broke my can opener. I need another can opener. I need to buy it. Don't sell can openers by the way, but that's just an example. But the point is, when I'm shopping on Amazon for a need item, I'm not going and saying, where's Norm's can opener? That's not what I'm searching for, nine out of 10 times. If I know Norm sells can openers, then I'm like, oh, I love it. I'm going to go buy it again. That's the exception to the rule. Most people are going on there saying, I need a can opener. I need a Ziploc bag. I need this. I need that. So when you say it very clearly and your brand takes a little bit of a backseat, I'm not saying don't show your brand at all, but make it very clear what the person's getting. Don't make them have to look and guess. I've literally reviewed thousands and thousands of ASINs over the past 15 years and If I take a look at the hero image and I have the brand on a call and I'm like, the first thing I do is, can I see your hero image? Can I see your listing? And then they're like, there it is, click it. I'm like, nope, I'm not going to click it just yet. I want to see what it looks like on the SERP as a customer. They're like, no, no, click it. It'll tell you everything. You don't want me to click it. You don't want me to click it because if that's an ad and I don't know and I land on it, case in point, someone was selling blueberry flavored gummies for like creatine gummies, melatonin gummies, some kind of supplement gummy. But they didn't make it clear that it was blueberry. They showed blue gummies. That doesn't mean that it's blueberry. That could be blue raspberry. That could be some cool ice mint flavor. Who knows? But if you don't show blueberries around the outside, if you don't say very clearly on the packaging, blueberry flavored, what's going to happen is I might like what you're putting out there, And if it's a paid ad, I'm going to click on it, and then I'm going to land on it. I'm like, wait, this isn't Blue Raspberry. This is Blueberry. I hate Blueberry. I'm out of here. Your Tacos goes up, your ACoS goes up, and that's not good. So everyone wants to, I always tell everyone, chase CTR. If your conversion rate stays the same and your CTR increases, mathematically, you will make more money. It's just simple math, right? If your conversion rate stays the same and your CTR goes up, that means you're converting the same with more people landing on your page. Very, very easy. Very, very simple to attain. You don't need a full-blown agency to do these kind of things. That's why I like talking about CTR and optimization about this because There's not many things that you can do to affect your Amazon business within half an hour. You can't get more inventory hurried up into Amazon. You can't hurry up and find more money to dump. I mean, if you can, great, into PPC. SEO is going to take a little bit of time to rank and then you're going to have to go and see about what's going to work, what's not going to work. But your hero image, you change it and update it. You can be rocking it. I spoke to brands the morning of Black Friday. And they were still making changes and affecting their business. So that's why I always like to look at how can I affect my business on Amazon We're spending near zero dollars, right, but changing the landscape. If you have those blueberry gummies and you just threw blueberries in it, I show people this all the time in Canva. You don't have to be a Photoshop guru. Photoshop makes my head hurt. There's people that do amazing things with Photoshop, but you can very easily do a lot of this stuff with Canva and it's like 12 bucks a month. Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I'll give you a great example of, I'll give you two great examples of this. One is my beard oil. I stumbled on this. I had, um, oh, it was, um, John Dirkus was on the podcast and he was talking about his beard oil. And I said, I've never heard of that before. So I checked it out and I got some, but here's the thing. Very popular beard oil. Love it. Scents are awesome. But if you go to their listings, all you see is the brand name. You don't know, it's got a green stripe, a red stripe, an orange stripe. What the hell does that mean? You know, like one is beach sea salt. Okay, that's green, but you can't even see it. Even when you go and zoom in, it takes you a second because everything is on a bunch of clutter, the brand name, and at the very bottom, really small, and then Carlos Alvarez. I was doing a presentation on his online seller cruise on good packaging. Exactly what you're talking about. There's a soap company, has a five ounce soap. They have about 15 different scents. I just threw it up on the big screen and I went, all right, can anybody tell me a scent? Not one. It's so small at the bottom. Speaker 2: Or did it have those weird names that means nothing? I hate when they have those kind of things where I was looking at an ASIN the other day and literally the name, it was a cleaning product, but the name of it was Hotel California. That was the name of the scent. I love the Eagles just as much as anybody, but I did not know what Hotel California smelled like. Now, if I used the product before, I would know, oh, this smells great. I love it. But if I didn't know that, I'm looking at this like, does it smell like a hotel that's in California? Like what does that smell like? Turns out it was tropical, which is cool, you know, but I just need to know that. And I, I've even seen another one for a, um, like a syrup mixer, um, like for like coffees and, you know, mixed drinks and iced teas. And the name of it was like something like wild mermaid. Okay. What does, what does a wild mermaid taste like? It was, it was like, um, Kiwis. Again, it was something that was tropical, but if, I don't need to know Wild Mermaid. That's something that's good for like your D2C site for a brick and mortar store where someone can pick it up and hold it in their hands and play with it and look at it and go more oohs and ahhs. But I need to know exactly what we're talking about here. Otherwise, I'm not going to buy. Or what's worse than someone not buying is someone clicking thinking it's something else and then not buying. That's even worse than them never clicking at all because now your ad spans through the roof on a sponsored ad. Speaker 1: Or returning it, John. Okay, this doesn't smell like Wild Mermaid. Speaker 2: Yeah, I've had my fair share of smelling Wild Mermaid and this is not them, sir. It's funny because I actually have, you say beard oil and I have severe beard envy being on this call with you and me. I like to think that mine is pretty good and then I see yours and then it's like I'm a fresh shaven baby. So I don't even bother talking about my beard at all. But like I get sent so many samples like when I talk to people, they're like, oh John, that helped. Let me send you some stuff. I'm like, cool, go ahead, send it to me. And you know, I'm going to, I'm not going to show the brand name of this, but they send it over here, right? This is a visual for anyone that's listening. Beard oil. And then it says sandal underneath it, but it's like, it's good that you say beard oil. Cause I know exactly that it's a beard oil. But what's so good about it? It can't just be a beard oil. It has to be a beard oil something, right? Beard oil supplement, beard oil with argan oil, beard oil. What's the USP? What's the value prop inside of it, right? And what a lot of people don't realize, you've seen your fair share or smelled your fair share of beard oils, I'm assuming, right? You've come across, this is a sandalwood. So I'm sure you've came across a sandalwood scent at some point, right? I couldn't tell you verbatim what, this is not even open, I didn't even open this. I could not tell you what sandalwood smelled like. So, it's also not about just saying the scent very clearly. You could say, this is spice sandalwood. What does that smell like? I don't know. I've never smelled sandalwood before, right? So, does it have, you know, a woody kind of smell? Is it a fruity kind of smell? So, you have to lean into it and make it really, really clear. You have to pretend, I always tell people, I have a nine-year-old son. If my nine-year-old son can take a look at your hero image and know exactly what it is, you got a good one. But if my nine-year-old has to be like, dad, what's spice sandal would smell like? I don't know. That's a good question. I don't even know. It's sitting on my desk. I have no idea what it smells like. So I really think that's super important. And I like that example you gave about soap because I've purchased body washes and soaps before. Old spice is, you know, culprit, you know, number one with this kind of stuff. They swagger and, you know, all these kind of manly, you know, aggro names. What does it smell like? I've ordered stuff that I've gotten and I'm like, this smells crazy, you know? So I think Old Spice probably doesn't care as much, but if you're a smaller brand that's up and coming and trying to build a brand, you don't look at what The top dogs are doing because they don't have to do best practice. Everyone tells me Oh Dove does this I'm gonna do like Dove. Well, you're not Dove, right? Yeah, you're not a multi-billion dollar company where you can afford to just not you're not a Nike. You're not a Dove You're not an Apple. So you have to sell in your images and where I clash heads or bump heads a lot is when brands have Creative directors and the creative director says oh no, no, no, no That's against brand guidelines. We want it sleek and minimalistic. That's a painful conversation because it comes down to do you want to just be a brand on Amazon or do you want to sell on Amazon? Speaker 1: Alright, we're at the bottom of the hour and if you're a new listener, we do something a little bit special here. We get people signed up for the Wheel of Kelsey at the top of the hour and what does that mean is usually it's our guest that gives a prize away. So John, what is the giveaway today? Speaker 2: So, we're giving away a double whammy. So, I don't know if Kelsey's going to, we're going to do two, oh, two winners or two people for an extra entry. So, we're doing $100 in pig food credits, which if you do it right, folks, that's a good two polls or a really good one poll, depending on the targeting and the traits. There's over 90 plus traits, but that's going to really, if you do the right test and anyone that wins that, do a click test with your SERP. I promise you, you will get like the aha moment. The other thing is a strategy call with Aspie. So Norm, I don't know if you know, but I recently just opened my own kind of creative agency on the side where I'm working with brands and agencies as well to do all these strategic, tactical merchandising things and assistance. So with that, normally it's a $500 call. That's going to be the big old goose egg, $0 today. Speaker 1: Very good. All right. And Tony, I see that you have a question in here and we'll be getting that more towards the top of the hour. Okay. Let's go over to a sponsor and then we'll be right back. Hey, Amazon sellers. Are you leaving money on the table with Amazon? Well, TrueOps is here to help you reclaim every last cent you're owed. Over 1,400 brands have already recouped millions with TrueOps cutting edge technology. Finding reimbursements others may have missed. And guess what? You only pay 10% commission. No more overpaying the industry standard of 25%. Plus the first $1,000 in reimbursements is free to you. Here's the best part. TrueOps doesn't get paid unless you do. If Amazon ever reverses a claim, TrueOps automatically credits your fees back to you. Now that's peace of mind. Remember, $1,000 free reimbursements to start than just 10% of successfully recovered funds. You have nothing to lose but the three minutes it takes to sign up for a free audit and so much more to gain. Sign up with the link in the description and start reclaiming what's rightfully yours. All right, I wanna talk about A photographer. So you've got this hero image. You've got a million different photographers out there charging a huge, very diverse price range. What do you look for? What questions do you ask that photographer? Speaker 2: I'm in the space with a lot of creative agencies that do photography, right? They do bang up job. It's expensive, right? It's not cheap to get photography. Speaker 1: Define expensive. Speaker 2: It's like good, good, fast and cheap. You can only pick two, right? So it's like you want good and fast. It's not going to be cheap. You want fast and cheap. It's not going to be good. So typically what I've seen, I've seen photography go upwards of 10K, so $10,000. And I've seen photography as low as 300 bucks. So when you're doing that, what are you getting for it? What are you actually getting inside the photography? Are you getting a full-blown photo shoot with lifestyle images? And if you are, is it the specific ICP and avatar that you're reflecting inside of it? Case in point, if you're selling supplements for senior dogs, older dogs, Is it going to be a lifestyle shot of a young girl running in the park with a young dog? If so, you might want to get your money back because that's not going to resonate because it's probably going to be a really good looking image, but if it's for older dogs, it's not connecting the emotional dots together and making sense. So, and then if you go to the lower end, right, what are you getting? Probably just product shots. You know, for the $300 to $500 range, you're typically not getting any sort of real lifestyle shots. What you're probably getting is product shots that they would then render inside of lifestyle images to the best of their capability. Speaker 1: Don't have a budget? No problem. John shares a crazy JC Penney hack for pro level product photos without hiring an expensive photographer. Speaker 2: And this is this is a little bit of a hack So, you know just everyone if you hear it kind of keep it to yourself Don't don't blow it up and tell your friends because then then it's gonna get all you know muddled up But Norm, have you heard of JC Penney? Yes Okay, everyone's heard of JC Penney Everyone their mom took them there get some pants for church and then you had to go get your pictures taken there what people don't realize is That if you go to if you have a JC Penney's near you and they have the portrait studio The sitting fee is I think less than $20. Where JCPenney makes their money is when you buy the assets afterwards, magnets, this, that, but they have a digital package where they'll take almost unlimited photos of whatever you want with the hopes that you're going to buy their magnet, their calendar, their this or that, but what you want to do is just go and get the digital package because I think the digital package is something like a hundred bucks. If you do it strategically, you get friends together, people together that resemble that ICP. You're going in there and let's say it's the beard oil, right? Let's say we're doing a beard oil. So then I'm going to get the photographer to take a million shots of my hand like this with the white background that I can manipulate into a million other different things. I'm going to put it on a table, have them take pictures of the table. Yes, take a picture of my friend here, the beard oil. And then we're going to have lifestyle shots where people that are handing it to each other, people are going like this on their face, all that kind of stuff. Because now, Right for a fraction of what you would pay. Now, given, is it going to be as great as the $10,000 one? No. The $10,000 one is going to be super overly produced, really, really solid, but if you can't spend the 10K and most folks that are just getting started on Amazon or they have their side gig and they really want to have it take over their 9 to 5, you don't have 5 to 10 grand to drop on photos. That's 5 to 10 grand that can go to inventory. That's the most important thing. You could have the world's best photos. If you don't have inventory, what are you doing? So, I think that is one hack that a lot of people have doubled and tripled down on because I think JCPenney might catch on to this, that people are doing this because typically you walk in and it's a sitting fee per person. I think it's like $15 and they will literally take all the photos you want. So, imagine if you're selling clothing and apparel, right? Wear it, go there and crop out your head, crop out the bottom if you're the ICP or have a friend wear it or have anything like that. Now, you instantly have unlocked the hack where you could have all the photos you need. Now, given there's going to be some folks that, I don't have any friends or I don't have anyone that looks like this or, you know, maybe I sell something. I can't just like log into, you know, JCPenney's. Maybe I sell carburetors. I can't do that. That's kind of weird. But for the case that you can, whether it's I've seen people do this for like hats that they sell on Instagram and you know, they'll go to JCPenney's wearing the hats and they'll be like, Oh, what kind of background do you want? You want the Christmas background? You want the holiday background? Nope, I just want the green screen or Nope, I just want the plain white background. They're smart because they know they're just going to go and drop and remove the background in Canva and put it in any situation they want. Remember, that's a professional photo. It's still on a DSLR. It's still with lighting, professional lighting, but it's a little bit of a hack. Speaker 1: I'm going to provide another hack. This is something that I've been blown away with. This one I've never heard of, so you got me. This is awesome. Thank you, John. But this is another one that I use for lifestyle. I'll go into the B2B or Airbnb, go to their experience, hire a photographer for $30 to $50. They take me around to all the different areas in the cities and you just bring a model or two to shoot your lifestyle photos. It costs nothing. And these guys are just doing it to get some exposure. So I know Kevin and I, when we went to Times Square and took the shots for Marketing Misfits, that's what we did. We just hired a VRBO experienced photographer. And you just book them right on their website. It's cool. Nobody knows it. Speaker 2: You know, the funny thing is a lot of these, I'm not going to say names, we're not name dropping here, Norm, but a lot of these creative studios, they do that. They will go and as they get projects, will have a dedicated Airbnb that they'll go to if they know it's a more modern or more traditional, right? And they don't have a studio. They'll just take the Airbnb and aggregate X amount of clients that they have and just take one or two days and knock out all that work. A lot of people don't realize that. A lot of smoke and mirrors. Still puts out a good result, but there are some smoke and mirrors. Speaker 1: What do you feel about 3D renderings? Speaker 2: I think 3D renderings for the right product can work, meaning if it's utilitarian. I don't think 3D renderings on apparel would really work well or anything like that, anything someone's actually wearing, but if it's something like A can opener. There's, I think, levels to how the rendering is polished, whether it has, you know, lighting tones and, you know, if it looks realistic or not. So yeah, I think it really depends on the product and how finished the actual rendering is. If it just comes out like a CAD file and it just looks real choppy and there's no dimension to it, I don't think that's so great. But yeah, I've seen really good renders. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm using them more and more depending on the product. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Your hero image might look good, but is it selling? Find out the secret to stopping the scroll and boosting conversions now. Speaker 2: Color is the biggest thing that's going to stop the scroll. So if you're in a sea of white supplement bottles and yours is blue, that's a pattern interrupt that's going to stop the scroll. If you say clearly with your font what you are, Versus your competition that's using thin font or cursive or a hard to read font, that's going to stop the scroll. I encourage anyone listening or watching to just go and search your favorite thing to eat, like a snack or anything like that. You're going to see how it stops the scroll. So the other thing is going to be flavor. Flavor is going to stop the scroll if something has a flavor or scent. If I know that I want to see something or taste something, And they're showing it to me clearly. I'm stopping and I'm looking. I might not buy, depending on what I need, but that's really what it's going to be. So it's color. It's going to be the flavor profile shown or not shown. It's going to be the font. Very, very clear. And like I said, a lot of these things go against if you have a creative director or brand guidelines. Oh, no, no, no. Our font is very thin, minimalistic, sleek, you know, very modern. No. I think the core fundamental is that Amazon is a marketplace. If you're talking about your D2C website, you've got room to breathe. You've got elbow room. I came to your site on purpose. I want to know more about you. You have room to expand and get all fancy with it, but Amazon, people tend to forget that it's a marketplace. It's just like walking down the aisle of a store. What's going to grab your attention when you're walking down? I was looking at books the other day in Target with my kids. The first thing that caught my eye was this book I'm always a sucker for them when I'm a kid too that had like a little tiny toy or some sort of activity that was attached to the top right hand corner. That's immediately where my eyes went and that's the thing like what is your little toy? What is your little call-out that's going to stop? Now a lot of people will say, oh I'm putting that it's 5,000 milligrams my My supplement, and the other guy says it's 4,000, so I'm better, it's 5,000. I'll be honest, I couldn't tell you if 4,000 is better than, how much better is that extra 1,000 gonna give me? But instead of that, if you were to say biotin hair growth, or supports liver function, or if you're telling me exactly what it is, oh, I get it, right? That's gonna stop the scroll as well. So I think really understanding benefits over features. To many people get that confused where they're like, oh, like with a blender, I have a titanium triple blade mixer or I have a four speed motor inside of it with all these things. What does that mean? What does that mean? Does that mean that I can make soup faster or I can make a smoothie quicker? So talk to it more how people would shop because I know my wife when she shops on Amazon, if she saw, you know, triple carbide, you know, tip blade for a blender, it's like asking her, do you want the flux capacitor from Back to the Future? She's not gonna know. She's like, sure, no problem, right? It doesn't mean anything until it means something. Speaker 1: I've noticed this a lot and I've done this myself, but again, just stopping the scroll. Sometimes going back to those beard oils and the soap boxes that are so cramped you can't see anything. One of the things that we do is we just clean up the label. So if it's a supplement, we take off the label. The wrap that has the directions coming down, the key ingredients on the other side. So we stretch that out. And then if there's anything outside of anything that's 100% required, we could try to clean it up, enlarge the logo or the scent or whatever it is. And that in itself will get you better conversion rates because if somebody's going to look, it might be a pattern interrupt and it's so cluttered you can't read it and people are trying and hunting around, that takes a bit of time. That takes more than a microsecond. They're going to go over to the other listing that has the big label, that looks sharp, that looks like it's a high perceived value, and they can read it. Speaker 2: Well, that's the thing, right? I know we're coming at a time soon, so I don't want to get into a whole other rabbit hole, but that's why I'm not a huge fan of when people use premium A-plus in their A-plus content and they put carousels in it. Why don't I like that? It's because you're making the customer or the shopper do work. You're putting them to work to find the information they need to know and the same thing applies for your hero image. Stop making people work hard to understand why they should buy your product. Make it stupidly easy for them to understand. Almost market to them like they're eight-year-olds and just say, this is it. You need this. Here's exactly what you need to know. Speaker 1: All right, we got three questions. Let's get to it. Unknown Speaker: Our first question is from Tony. A large packaging with the product description text always is better in the first image, but does that mean we would increase the actual product size, which would cost more money to look like that or actually manipulate the pictures? Speaker 2: Yeah, everything that we're talking about, Tony, I know Tony. Tony's a nice guy. Everything is going to be a post edit. So when you're doing this on something that's a utilitarian, not a giftable item, you're never going to run into an issue. So like what Norm said about like beard oil, if you have small text and you make it larger, is someone going to receive that beard oil and say, Oh my God, you got a lot of nerve. I was looking for the large font on my beard oil. I got one with small font. Absolutely not. You will run into this issue if you sell something like a mom box or something that's very ornate and giftable and you make the box look like it has something on it. And then they get it and that's not how it is because that is something someone is gifting to someone else and they purchased it because of the presentation. So those kind of things I would steer clear from, but anything that's utilitarian, think of the last time you ordered on Amazon and you got it in the mail, you just ripped it open out of the box and started to use it. You didn't even realize what the packaging inside of it was. That's how 90% of my purchases are. So as long as you're not in that giftable category, these are all post edits. Unknown Speaker: We got another question from Tony. For photography, if you're launching with three variations, does that mean that three times the cost for that? Speaker 2: It depends on who's doing your photography. If you go into the JCPenney John Aspinall hack, no. But some photographers will do one or two different things. They'll say if you have three different colors, we have to take all three different shots of the three different colors. Some photographers will do post-editing and change the color way. I'm talking about apparel for this instance. If it's a green, blue, and red shirt, you could easily change that in post-editing. If it's patterns and stuff like that, they might not be able to do so. So it really depends, but generally it shouldn't be three times the cost, but unless you have something very specific. Unknown Speaker: Okay, last question. What's the top AI software that you're currently using? Speaker 2: Oh, I'm using a controversial AI software that a lot of folks don't like to talk about. I use Perplexity with DeepSeek inside of it because I found that DeepSeek R1 is The best possible reasoning model paired with perplexity, which is the best search model. The reason why I say it's a little bit controversial is because DeepSeek is based in China and a lot of people are like, oh, the Chinese are going to get my information. When you use DeepSeek R1 insider perplexity, it's hosted in the US through perplexity. So your information searches data is not going to China. That's why it's the best. It's 20 bucks. It's literally the best thing I've ever used. Speaker 1: I haven't set it up that way, but I just like perplexity. It's a great search tool and it's only getting better. Kevin and I were talking about this last night, but for fonts, inserting fonts onto graphics or creating a graphic through an LLM, there's a site called Ideogram. That's I-D-E-O-gram. I just started playing around with it last night. Kevin told me about it. And it's it's great. Now, by the way, we're doing this cigar event. Tony's gonna love me for this. He doesn't like cigars. But we're doing a cigar event down in in Tampa. And I wrote a prompt. It was an okay prompt. And I asked it to, I took a picture of an image that Kevin has in his condo and then I put it in there. The quality of the banner that I got with one try was incredible. The only thing I had to change was it had smoke coming out of the ashtray instead of the cigar. Fairly simple to fix, but what I do with that is I send over, like Kelsey and I have been doing this for weeks now, is we send over the creative to spark creativity through the ChatGPT and then I send it over to our creative people and say, okay, this is a guideline. This is what I want. Do it. Speaker 2: Yeah. Ideogram is really, really good at the text with AI, because if you go into a typical model LLM and you ask it for an image with text on it, I don't know what language it's given you. It's a little bit English. It's a little bit Russian. It's a little bit, you know, Willy Wonka's language, whatever he says, because some of the words just come out bananas and, you know, people on LinkedIn and people on social, it's a dead giveaway when you're using AI for image generation, when you just, you know, take whatever it spits out and roll with it. So yeah, ideogram is really, really solid with the text. Speaker 1: Hey John, let's get some contact information. Speaker 2: Yeah, anyone who wants to reach out to me, Aspinall, A-S-P-I-N-A-L-L, at PickFu.com, head over to PickFu.com. Also, reaching out to me at Aspi, GoAspi, G-O-A-S-P-I.com. It's the shortest domain that I think I've ever been able to possibly secure, so I'm really happy with that, even though when I type it in 9 out of 10 times, it auto-corrects to gossip. But yes, John at GoAspi.com, reach out to me there too. Speaker 1: All right, now let's go over to the sponsor. Unknown Speaker: Start, scale, exit, repeat. I'm Colin C. Campbell and I've started over a dozen multi-million dollar companies in the last 30 years. I spent the last 10 years writing the book, Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat, to figure out what it is that these serial entrepreneurs do over and over again. We interviewed over 200 people. We created 58 chapters over 30 illustrations 180 call outs and we quite frankly made this book. For the ADHD Entrepreneur. It's been number one on Amazon in 15 categories and has won 12 awards globally. Get your book today either on ebook, paperback, hardcover, or audible on Amazon or your favorite bookstore. Speaker 1: All right, let's go to the wheel. Unknown Speaker: Okay, so I'll shuffle these up and it looks like the winner is... Speaker 1: Cool Hand. Unknown Speaker: Cool Hand. Speaker 2: Cool Hand Luke. Speaker 1: All right, that is it. Thank you, sir. Thank you for the prize. Congratulations, Luke. You're gonna love that. And John, we will see you somewhere soon. I know you're always hanging around our chat room. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's been a pleasure, Norm. Next place I'll be, are you gonna be at Prosper? Speaker 1: Oh yeah, for sure. Speaker 2: I'm speaking at Prosper. My first time going to Prosper and I'm speaking. Double whammy. Speaker 1: Very good. Very good. Well, we'll see you there. Speaker 2: Thanks Norm. Unknown Speaker: Just wanted to mention to everyone that we do have a brand new subreddit on Reddit. So if you go to Lunch With Norm on Reddit, you'll be able to find a community there. It's brand new. We just started yesterday. So it's brand new. It's a place for questions, for episodes. If you have any updates in the world of Amazon, anything you'd like to discuss, either guests, topics, just about the episodes in general, it's a place to go. Check it out and let us know your thoughts. Speaker 1: All right, everybody. So thanks for tuning in today. Thanks for being part of the community. If you want more, you can either just continue listening to the podcast, sign up for the newsletter, go over to our WhatsApp group, now our Reddit group or our Facebook group. So there's a lot there to choose from. You can pick one or you can pick them all. Regardless, we'll see you next Wednesday.