What it Takes to Build a Brand on Amazon

What it Takes to Build a Brand on Amazon Speaker 3: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Better Advertising with BTR Media podcast. Today I'm incredibly excited to be in Cannes with two of my favorite humans of the space, but I'll let you two introduce yourself. Speaker 1: Jeff? Speaker 2: Jeff Cohen with Amazon ads and I've been a longtime listener, longtime friend of the podcast. I think I've been on a couple of times, but happy to be back and sharing with everybody. Speaker 1: I lead e-commerce over at Nestle Health Science and happy to be back and chat all things advertising. Speaker 3: So we never get together casually, it seems like. The first time we were all on stage at Amazon Accelerate conference, which was incredible, and now we're at Cannes Lions, round two. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. That was actually a great session when we did that at Accelerate and it was really this like light bulb moment for me that when Amazon, the brand, and the agency are all on stage together. We can really help the audience understand what it is, how it works, and why they need to consider it. Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think we really got the opportunity to chat about some really tactical and helpful things, as you say as well. You've got the full funnel of the audience there with being able to talk from the Amazon side, the partner side, partnership side, and then the brand. Speaker 3: Speaking of full funnel, that was the key of our topic last time, but full funnel then I felt like was leaned into a little bit more sponsored brands, sponsored display. It's only been two years since we had that conversation, but there's been a ton of change in the space. And I think full funnel is one of the biggest topics Jeff and I are always talking about as a brand side. You've already got that done and figured out. You're well established in that area. But one thing we're always talking about is like how do you innovate in the space? How do you keep up with all of the trends? Jeff, what are the most exciting things that you think have happened since our last conversation? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it comes down to the idea that the canvas that Amazon has is so much larger than It's ever it's ever been before right in the last two years prime video advertising is now a thing We moved on from just Thursday night football to a whole sports offering Amazon ads are now available for people who don't sell on Amazon or even if you sell on Amazon But you want to drive traffic to your D2C site. You can use Amazon ads and And so Amazon has kind of opened up the opportunities for brands to reach more and more shoppers in different and unique ways, both on their own and operated inventory, as well as the third party supply, which helps you reach hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of shoppers, depending on the scale of your business and what you're looking to do. Speaker 3: Gabi, you oversee multiple brands and I can only imagine what it's like keeping up with everything, but being at Cannes, understanding kind of this broader vision of Amazon, how is that exciting for a brand like yours? Speaker 1: I think, you know, just very similar to what Jeff was saying is the opportunity of so many different places and, you know, multi-touch points that you can have with these consumers. We play in the space where we've got several brands that are in similar categories as well and being able to hyper-target It is often a huge struggle but made so much easier with the tools and products that Amazon offers. Speaker 3: Hyper-targeting is a big one. I would say audiences in general have guided a lot of our most recent discussions, things like AMC audiences being layered into your search strategy. So to your point, you have a keyword like dog food. Everyone's potentially bidding on dog food. We now have the ability to niche down to an audience that is also bidding on dog food. So from a swim lane perspective, which is how you and I typically view it, but also again, the broader funnel, you can now start making assumptions that aren't just based off search intent, but also a specific audience that may better align with your products and your categories. Speaker 2: The thing that I think people need to realize about you, besides that you're an awesome human being, Gabi, just in case they're not seeing the video, is that, and maybe you can speak to this a little bit, you operate with playbooks. When you learn, you develop, you test into playbooks. You learn from those tests and then you apply them to the other brands in the ways that they need to be applied because some will work and some won't. I think a lot of the success that you've seen in building your e-commerce portfolio of products, I don't want to say it's been repeating the same thing, but it's learning from those playbooks and reapplying them. So many great brands, this is what they do. Speaker 1: Yeah no hundred percent that's it's a huge opportunity but it's definitely not a copy and paste by any means because at the end of the day we're obsessing over the consumer. The consumer is slightly different meaningfully different depending on the brand depending on the product that we have going on right so there are there's definitely a. Playbook of where to start, but then the ABT always be testing is kind of a table stakes rule within this portfolio of brands that we have. And ultimately, we have to do everything as much as possible to be able to understand who that end consumer is. And it is very different. We have thousands and thousands of products across Many brands that play in one of the most competitive spaces, high growth areas, and that growth is not slowing down on Amazon anytime soon. Those consumers are exposed to a multitude of these touch points. So yes, we have a playbook, but it's really, that's the starting point for us. Speaker 3: Something that I feel like we've talked a lot about is how you can find the common denominator across those playbooks and boil it down to just psychology or the philosophies that you can apply. And then you can test and iterate in maybe smaller pieces that are a little bit more risk-averse, potentially, depending on the brand. So one of the things that we've been talking about is, again, the obsession with the end consumer, whether it's your shipping times or whether it's your relevancy when it comes to advertising. These are areas where we've been able to say, hey, there's a defined playbook here. And then when there's a small tweak to whether it's the ad product that's being rolled out or the new innovation, you can then dip your toes in while still maintaining that kind of common philosophy that can be applied everywhere. Speaker 2: Yeah, you're looking for patterns that would then indicate that it would work for another brand. I don't want to knock anybody, but I don't know that the overall strategy for Prime Day has really changed. I would agree. It's a lead in, it's a period, and then it's a lead out. I think some of the tactics that you use change and they're going to continue to change over time, but that's what I mean by you're applying that playbook. When a brand starts to realize, or a portfolio brand starts to realize what upper funnel advertising does, To the impact their performance marketing, right, if that's what you're trying to drive, then you can start to see that shifting dollars to streaming television or to prime video or to You know, more upper funnel type tactics is actually improving your search business even though, you know, you may not, it may not be counterintuitive to understand how those two things work, but when we talk to To brands that are making that investment, that's what they're seeing and they're able to kind of recalculate the way they look at return on investment because they're looking at it in that full funnel. And when you say like, what's changed in the last two years? Well, that's what we've learned with AMC. That's what we've learned with these new advertising types and we're now seeing more and more brands put that into their playbook. Speaker 3: Let's talk about that for a little bit. Something that Gabi and I have been mentioning a lot is building your business for your audience and not just the algorithm. I think historically people would build things for an algorithm specifically looking for that ROAS and maybe not consider the common psychology aspect. You mentioned lead-in has always been a thing. Yes, but if we again go back to the consumer sentiment on lead-in period has changed a little bit because now Prime Day is synonymous with a national shopping holiday. When it was first launched it wasn't so you didn't have as many shoppers preparing and they weren't preparing, they weren't window shopping, they weren't adding to cart or list building. So we know in general for any holiday, you're going to have a lead-in period where people are going to prepare and ready and that's the psychology, that's the pattern that brands need to lean into. The iteration of it in my opinion is now, okay, it is the largest shopping holiday. Correct me if I'm wrong, anyone on Amazon there, but in general, I feel like it's the largest shopping holiday. Everyone knows about it, I feel like. So that lead-in period is now more important because more people are adding to cart, more people are list building because they know that day is coming. So that almost makes it more important to have a larger leaded budget because you're having to capture attention before Prime Day where you have so much noise on the platform or in the industry in general that customers get lost in the noise. So the psychology is the same. We need to let customers know about what we're doing during our national holiday, but the The details matter and that's where I think the application to Gabi's perspective. We need to change and iterate on the details. I think lead is more important now than it's been historically because of the noise and the competition in the space. Speaker 1: Yeah, look, you mentioned something of the Prime Day playbook has not changed. It hasn't from the perspective of the period. The periods have adjusted a little bit. But at the end of the day, if you're playing the algorithm game, you are going to lose. It's going to change faster than you can try and change and test and experience that. So you have to be in this obsessive about that consumer journey for the brands as well, but generating demand at all costs from a variable set of sources. And that's where the upper funnel journey, the mid to upper funnel journey is incredibly important and a great opportunity to You know, searches, you can't just convert at the search area. You've got to guide that consumer along. Speaker 2: I want to pause here because I don't get to correct Destaney very often, but Prime Day is actually an international holiday. Speaker 1: International. Speaker 2: And I don't know if it's the largest, but we'll take it. We'll take it if it is. But what I think is, maybe Gabi, you can speak to this, is We know or we've learned what to do for Prime Day and for Turkey 5-11, whatever the number is these days. But what about the other holidays on Amazon, right? You do a lot with pets. There's a pet holiday in May, right? There's beauty holidays. There's health holidays. Do you take the same approach to those holidays that you take to a Prime Day? Speaker 1: I would say it's relatively similar from the broader concepts of generating demand from a variety of sources at all costs with that lead-in period. And we're in a consumables category where consumers are going to repurchase probably every 30 to 90 days-ish. And so the lead out for us is mission critical. The days of, we kind of let things Work out the way that they're going to because we've obsessed over the lead in as much and that lead out so that's whether it's. A four-day Prime Day that we have this year or whether it's a pet holiday, whether it's Earth Day, a lot of our brands participate in that. So I think the only difference for us is whether Amazon makes it a bigger tentpole event or whether it's something that we as a portfolio of brands are trying to create a little bit of an event. Speaker 2: Yeah, I just want people to kind of think that yes, the big tentpoles are really important but there are a lot of tentpoles that could be important to you either regionally Right, where you're trying to grow your business or in the category that you play in. Speaker 1: Yeah, we play in a lot of different spaces of the seasonality in our industry as well but doing things like spend X, get Y across a portfolio is a really fantastic opportunity for us. We introduce a lot of new consumers in those types of campaigns. That's not an event. That's over a period, 30-60 day period that we've got that campaign running. It's a slower burn because the period is longer. We're not targeting a four-day event, but again, the playbook is pretty similar. The timeline is just adjusting. Speaker 3: Going back to that main point, it's curating an experience for a specific audience. I think a lot of people historically, especially in the e-commerce space, tried to go way too broad because they could, right? You can target everyone really quickly. Operationally, it's really easy. And what we're seeing with Amazon's new product rollouts and just from a customer sentiment as well is we have the ability to target people in these micro moments. So whether it's saying, hey, you know, maybe I don't want to compete or can't compete in these larger holidays, But where do I know I have a higher propensity for a conversion? Whether it's a pet day or in the multivitamin space, we always saw back to school. That was a really unique period that maybe didn't make sense for all the brands, but knowing, okay, we have back to school coming up. How can we adjust our creatives? How can we better connect with the audience? Even if it is a sponsored TV campaign, something easy, no minimums, let's get it up and running. How can we target a specific audience at a certain point in time? With a creative that's maybe more aligned with what they're looking for. Speaker 2: When you start to think of that, it just reminds me of the question you asked to start this, which is like, what's changed in the last two years? Speaker 3: And nothing. Speaker 2: AMC now has five-year look-back windows. Speaker 3: Yes. Speaker 2: The ability to bring in first-party data into AMC allows you to have a better understanding of how your sales are doing, what your lifetime value is, what your cost per customer acquisition is. You know, numbers that we need that help us be smarter with our business. And I think like the challenge for brands is to figure out how to use these numbers, use these audiences without being overwhelmed. And that kind of goes back to, you know, always be testing, right? And building these things in an iterative way that allow you to Understand what works and double down on that and move on from the stuff that doesn't. Speaker 1: I think we really cannot underestimate the art of possible with AMC and it is a huge challenge for brands as well. You know, whether you're using a partner, whether you're building that skill internally, but to your comment about being able to hyper target these consumers at different areas, different need states as well. If I take an orgain protein shake, I've got dozens of sub audiences of why they are taking that. You've got Gabi who won't eat during the day because she's locked in and forgets and then it's 3 p.m. and my shake in my coffee is that, but you've got Busy mom or dad running out the door taking the kids to school. You've got it in the school, you know, in the kids shakes. All of those are very different intents of why they're trying to purchase the exact same product. AMC has been that sort of treasure trove for us to be able to understand that and I feel like you can never get too niche, honestly. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: Well, it's not just audience now either. Now, as you mentioned, you have all of these Different attributes you can lean into. We now have the power to do it with creative in a way that's never been scalable historically. Creative Studio, I think, was announced, unboxed. There's been a ton of iterations to that. Now we have the opportunity to serve Gabi with a little computer and a dog next to it, like an ad to this very specific audience, but also to maybe the parent that is running to school. The way you adjust those creatives and target that specific audience is going to increase everything from click-through rate, conversion rate to ACOS ROAS and just... Loyalty. People want to see things that make them feel good and feel like themselves. I think being able to adjust creative with AI, audiences with AMC is going to be a huge unlock for brands. Speaker 1: As we have more addressability, there's also the studies coming out of almost half of the US population feels that they're not represented in the ads that they're seeing too. This is a dilemma of You've got more opportunities than ever to be able to hyper-target, yet brands and advertisers could absolutely be doing a better job of using the tools made available to them. The creative is a huge area. That's often a bottleneck for brands. Whether you're a large brand and you're going through your legal regulatory comms to get through all of the creative, or whether you're a smaller brand that can't afford to have a whole video production, now it's democratized that massively. I think that we really are on this peak of being able to have small brands, medium brands, large brands be able to create this custom creative that is going to hyper-target the different folks wherever they are in their journey. That's not been as easily available as it is right now. Speaker 2: I'll put a plug in. We can attach it to this episode. You guys did an amazing I'll call it a guide for how to use the Creative Studio. If you're not familiar with that product, that guide is a great walkthrough of the product, how to use it, the power that it has. It's not outdated, even though it's been out now for a couple of months. For a brand, the question then becomes, well, how often do I change my creative? How much do I do this for my head products? Do I do it for my torso? Do I do it for my tail? So I'd be curious, Gabi, how do you think of that? Speaker 1: I don't know that we have, I don't know that anyone has that clocked in. My goal is to get to dynamic creative. I feel like we're incredibly far from that, but dynamic creative, if I go back to the OG days of hands-on keyboard writing listings and whatnot, I would update that monthly based on the search term trends that are changing and what's happening across platforms and then that's changing consumers' behavior of what they're looking for. You know, where we should be, and I feel like where brands are, there is a meaningful delta there. How we prioritize, I think, is easier to tackle from a question point. At the end of the day, where we do both our head products, the best sellers, but also we hyper-study the entry points. And those are often, I've always been surprised about the entry points in our portfolio across our brands. They're often a lesser known product, but it's gotten us to a whole new audience type. Speaker 2: Maybe for people who don't understand the concept of an entry point. Take it a little deeper. Speaker 1: Oh, would you like me to talk about Costco chicken because So, you know just we have great example within the Garden of Life brand Best-selling products are probiotics. It is a probiotic brand first and foremost, but it really plays across the entire category of health and wellness. We've got Proteins, we've got multivitamins. We have a product that is phenomenal for if you are sick or getting sick called oil of oregano. I like to call it pizza water because it sort of smells like that a little bit, but it'll really do a great job. When we started doing Spanish language preferred, I do think that the acronym might have changed now for that one, but when we started to explore that audience with Amazon, we noticed that the top selling product for this net new audience for us was oil of oregano, and that had never been on my radar before. So these entry point, not just price points, but the items within your portfolio that you wouldn't necessarily think of even when you're in the brand yourself. Speaker 2: So they're buying that and then they're becoming a customer and then their lifetime value is increased. And I'm assuming you're finding that through AMC. Speaker 1: Absolutely. Speaker 3: And there's so much opportunity with the other products, which was I think the opening point to this discussion is how do we cross sell? How do we upsell? How do we kind of leverage the opportunities we have to maybe tell more of that brand story? They're coming into that entry point with a specific product, but we now have the opportunity to retarget all of those customers with some of our other products and kind of really understand that lifetime value, but drive evangelism as well and drive more loyalty than just that one-off purchase. Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm trying to think how to speak to the people who maybe are listening who go, okay, that's great, but I'm not Garden of Life. I don't have a giant catalog, right? And I think that There is a value as you're building a business and you're building a brand that you need to have brand expansion and you need to be looking for these things like what are products that find audiences that then bring them in to buy other products from me. If you look at any D2C brand or any brand that's out there, they grow and they expand their product lines over time. You help your business when that's part of your strategy as well. You can't just have a single SKU, a single product, a single category. You have to have diversity across those. To reach more audiences and to bring more people in to then be buying from everything that you offer. Speaker 1: Absolutely. It's a treasure trove for the white space and innovation. So either you've got the product in your portfolio or it's an opportunity to improve your product or develop something more with your product. And that's probably a big miss that I see with brands today as well is not connecting the insights, the actual insights that come from this To their R&D innovation pipeline. It's a huge opportunity. It's not done enough. We obsess over it. Speaker 2: Do you do that from a packaging design perspective or a net new product perspective? Speaker 1: All of the above. Yeah, absolutely all of the above. Going through the ratings and reviews will be a big insight area too, but even just looking at a basket analysis of what else they're browsing and then eventually converting on or what else they're adding to cart in a few month period to see, hey, we don't have that in our portfolio. We've got the science behind it of what, you know, micronutrients work well together. If that's not working, if that's not what consumers are actually buying, we need that to validate what we, you know, ultimately bring out into the market from an innovation perspective. But packaging, I mean, we speak about the supply chain side of things and that's also what's going to help things like some same-day delivery is having things be Foster to the consumer, be lighter, be easier packaging. So there's a treasure trove of information there as well. Speaker 3: There's a lot we could dive into on that topic. There's a million different directions that we can take. But again, it's going back to those patterns and the core of are you building a brand to serve a need or are you selling a product? Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 3: Jeff, all three of us have played in both spaces. I think when we all got started in the industry, it was selling products. Now a lot of us are in the brand building space. It's really cool seeing Amazon embrace that and allow for that innovation. And the people who know how to use their resources. I mean, we talked on our last one about utilizing Rufus to better understand the customer queries and realize that we need to make a change in our, you know, Formulation because of flavor, taste, things like that. That's a huge opportunity. Take Search Query Performance Report. When we had Kate Bray on, the whole product that she built was based off information she found out in SQP. She realized there was a complete mismatch between search terms and the products that were on the market. So it's kind of finding that balance. Speaker 2: It's also industry trends, right? So I know some people that were at the Expo West show and they were like, everything at Expo West was non-alcoholic. It was a lot of non-alcoholic drinks and it was a lot of You know, last year it was all like 10 grams of protein and now all of a sudden all those companies are offering 15, 20, 30 grams of protein in their same drink because the consumer is looking for higher protein, smaller quantity. Speaker 3: We tried protein water. Speaker 1: Yeah, we tried. Speaker 2: Protein water? Speaker 1: Yeah, protein water. Another one that's sort of interesting from that, you know, and again the consumers have informed us. Speaker 2: Did it have flavor? Speaker 3: It was water, right? Speaker 1: It tasted just like water? I blacked it out. Speaker 3: I think we both thought we were getting scammed. I was really confused with the whole hydration scenario at Expo. I got served like three drinks and then I would try it and they'd be like, oh, it's non-alcoholic. I'm like, why are you giving me wine and not telling me? Speaker 1: Again, so whether they stick around, you see a lot of phenomenal things like Expo S and innovation flops often as well. So in order for it to not flop or often just fail fast as well, but obsess over that, okay, I've launched it, now what are the consumers doing? Well, I thought that they were going to do this when we launched this product, but what are they doing after that? The other area that is just explosive as you look as the demographics change in our category of health and wellness, pill fatigue is a huge thing. People don't want to take six, seven, eight pills multiple times a day. So now, you know, there's gummies everywhere and there's liquids everywhere. But by the by, we've spoken a lot about product innovation. That is the point of it, is that it's beyond There's huge opportunities within the advertising side of things, within how you can address micro audiences, but then also even how you can build your brand with all of this information, and that's going to be it at the end of the day. We're in it for the long game. We're in it to serve a need. We all need to move quicker. Speaker 2: You need to move quick, but you need to move methodically. With intention. That's the key. I heard a great restaurateur in the Chicago area who said, we open up a restaurant and our success is determined on what we do in the first 21 days that the restaurant's open. It's about the changes that we make when consumers come in and start doing it, and you can't You can't be so attached to what you create that you believe that you're right and the consumer is wrong. And I think that that's the power of AMC and the power of what Audiences is that you can have preconceived notions of who's buying your product, what's leading to other product buys, but if you're not validating that with the truth of what's happening, then you're missing out on the true growth potential of your business. Speaker 1: There can be no ego here. I get tripped up by this one all the time of what I think and how I think something's going to perform or what that audience might be. Speaker 2: I'll even go back again to your question about what's changed in the last two years, right? So now AMC has no code options, right? So even if you were like, well, I don't know how to write SQL, there are now opportunities for you to go in and be able to do that. And I think that's going to even change significantly over the next six to 12 months as AI really enters into the game and you'll just be able to ask just very general questions. And we're starting to see that with some of the tool providers that offer AMC that they're solving For the consumer who doesn't have the business analytic or technical skills that were necessary for AMC two or three years ago. Speaker 1: So what I'm hearing is Amazon is democratizing the ability to create fantastic targeted creative, but measurement as well, that you don't need to be the coder anymore. Speaker 2: I'll even go more broad and I'll say Amazon and our partners, right? So sometimes I think the innovation is coming directly from Amazon. I think a lot of the innovation is also coming From our agencies and from our tech providers who are really pushing the envelope in the space. And I think one of the very unique things that happens in this community is that the tech provider and agency community is very open about what they do. And it's a building process on top of one another that has led to The fast innovation that occurs within this space, and I think it's pretty unique. I mean, I've been in this space now for a really long time, so I haven't been in other spaces in a while. It probably happens other places, but it's really unique how it happens here and how open it happens here and how open a lot of people are about talking about it and understanding that they know they'll just keep innovating to create their differentiation and don't feel that it's a threat to share. Speaker 3: Absolutely. On that note, you should follow all three of us on LinkedIn. All three of us post a ton of content and I think are really passionate about kind of helping the community build those playbooks, which takes us back to I think the first principle we chatted about. It's a really good summary for this conversation of There are playbooks for how to succeed. Everyone has to iterate on those playbooks really quickly because of the innovation in the space, but also because of the differentiation, the customization that is provided throughout the tools and through the brands and the audience side of the space. Speaker 2: Is this where we are supposed to say put the word playbook in the comments? Speaker 3: Yes, put the word playbook in the comments. Jeff, Gabi and I will spin something up. Speaker 2: That's one of my pet peeves. Speaker 3: Well, comment me and we'll send you some resources. Speaker 1: Don't comment at Jeff. Unknown Speaker: Comment at Destaney, clearly. Speaker 3: Amazing. Well, thank you all so much for joining and love the conversation. Speaker 1: Thank you, friends. Speaker 2: Yeah, great to catch up.