Chapter 10: Building your brand off amazon
What is Direct Response Marketing?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Jason. Although my name is on the cover, the names of my teachers and mentors should be here as well. I couldn’t have written this book without their support and encouragement along the way, and it is with the deepest gratitude that I share their wisdom and influence here in these pages. Sometimes starting off is the hardest thing to do and I have Rick Cesari, my co-author, to thank for pushing me to put my thoughts down on paper. Without his kind wisdom, support, and seasoned marketing knowledge, I’m not sure I would have had the confidence to write a book that I believed could make a difference.
No one has guided me more on my Amazon journey than James Thomson, the “Godfather of Amazon Sellers”—a true warrior and champion of small business sellers. James has been there for me time and time again, and he does the same for thousands of other Sellers every day. Sellers, I salute you. I hold you in the highest regard. Your stories inspire me to continue my quest for fairer treatment by Amazon. Throughout this book I use the formal form when referring to Third-Party Sellers out of respect for the hard work and sheer grit that is required of them to survive—even thrive—on the Amazon.com platform.
Family is everything and I have been blessed with two great families. My Mom and Dad gave me life, raised me, and have stood by me through the roughest of times, even when I gave them every reason not to. For that I am forever grateful and especially happy for this opportunity to note it for the public record. And to the Klaristenfelds, my Jewish family from Los Angeles, who taught me a new way. You all gave me the unconditional love and support I needed to see my own potential and pursue my dreams. JB, thank you for standing by my side as we slayed one demon after the next. Last but never least, my most devoted gratitude to my incredible wife, Ann, without whom none of this would be possible. And to our amazing daughters, Maddy and Ellie, who keep me honest, happy, and full of pride every single day. I love you all.
Rick. First and foremost I want to thank Jason Boyce for the time we have spent together exploring one marketing idea after another. He has opened my eyes to this vast new world of Amazon marketing, and we’ve become good friends in the process. Along the way, I’ve learned more about the plight of 3P Sellers and how my years of experience in building winning brands is a natural fit for guiding Sellers to profitability on (and off) the Amazon platform. Thanks, too, to Ann Zinn Nikolai, who was part of my team in the early days at Trillium Health Products, and who has dedicated countless hours to helping Jason and I organize and edit this book. Adding Ann to the Friday morning coffee calls was something I looked forward to. Finally, my lovely wife Martha, who is always there to support me and give me space during the early morning hours when my thoughts and ideas flow easily.
Jason and Rick. To Morgan James Publishing, thank you for guiding us through the final steps of this book and for bringing it to market.
FOREWORD
Since Amazon launched its e-commerce marketplace 20 years ago, it has welcomed more than five million third-party sellers to its store, creating one of the largest consumer shopping destinations in the world. In the first few years of this marketplace concept, Amazon repeatedly refined its sales pitch to convince retailers and brands to add massive product selection to its nascent marketplace. By adding enough sellers that more than one would offer the same selection, Amazon kept on recruiting to increase the likelihood of price competition, and hence lower prices that would bring Amazon customers back to open their wallets over and over. Soon, Amazon added its Fulfillment by Amazon program, enabling many sellers with little to no logistics capabilities to turn over the responsibilities of inventory storage and order fulfillment to Amazon, all the while growing their individual seller businesses to become lean operators of multi-million-dollar-a-year businesses.
Such growth brings constant change: in the two decades that have followed, the dynamics on the marketplace have changed significantly. While there are still opportunities to land-grab sales revenue, most of the largest marketplace sellers achieve success by selling their own brands, or exclusively selling other companies’ brands. The importance of the brand name is less critical than the seller’s intimate knowledge of how the “Amazon sandbox” works, and what Amazon expects from each and every seller on the marketplace. Today, Amazon third-party sellers balance the opportunity to share in billions of dollars of annual sales, with the vicious levels of competition across millions of sellers (not all of whom are playing fairly or legally), compounded by opaqueness and contradiction of Amazon’s rather limited communication shared with sellers.
By the time I met Jason Boyce and his brothers in 2007, they were already selling millions of dollars from their own brands, constantly refining and making better than any existing national and international brands—a concept rarely seen back then on Amazon, but now used by tens of thousands of sellers that develop their own “born on Amazon” private-label brands to grab market share from better known brands. I thought Jason and his brothers were a little crazy to be going this route, but every pioneer must suffer through the ignorance of naïve onlookers. I am grateful that I learned from Jason early in my Amazon tenure so I could proselytize the beauty of private-label brands.
A few years later, Rick Cesari spoke at our Prosper Show to a room packed with Amazon private-label sellers, discussing his journey in launching several billion-dollar brands, leveraging television as his primary sales channel. For those in attendance, it was abundantly clear that the secret sauce for uncovering customers’ uncommunicated needs, and building brands to meet those needs had been perfected long before the birth of e-commerce by the man onstage!
The adventurous outdoorsman seeking to travel by boat down the 4,000-mile Amazon River will need to understand the full journey, knowledgeable of where the piranhas and bugs will disrupt it.