Jason Boyce, CEO and Founder of Avenue7Media, and author of The Amazon Jungle, shares insights with MARTECH. He says that established brands and newcomers avoid Amazon at their peril. That’s because consumers are already searching to buy these brands on Amazon, and sellers are waiting with steeply discounted inventory, generic alternatives, and even knockoffs that will eat into the brand’s market share.
“The way to protect yourself is to develop your own brand and be different,” said Boyce. “You are on much more solid ground when you defend your brand against, for instance, Chinese factories and Amazon itself.”
The reality about Amazon branding today is they develop their own in-house products to compete with top-selling brands on their site. A report last year suggested that Amazon went even further with their operations in India, using data from sellers on their site to make their own brands more competitive.
Given all this competition, the best path for brands to take, according to Boyce, is to provide a better value proposition for customers and to develop a higher-quality product. Customer engagement, user comments, and sales on Amazon generate the data that marketers can use to maintain their advantage in the face of all this competition.