Brand Protection on Amazon: What Brands Must Know to Maximize & Protect Sales on Amazon.com
How important is having a strong brand when selling on Amazon.com and other ecommerce platforms?
CJ Rosenbaum – I think the brand is absolutely vital. One, you are building up value and intellectual property that you actually own, so if your account goes down, whether it’s on Amazon or Etsy or Walmart or eBay, you actually own the brand still and no one can take that away from you. It also helps develop brand loyalty, which leads to sale and then resale and upsale and accessories. I think branding is absolutely vital and Rob can talk about a lot of the tools that you get once you have an established brand on Amazon that helps us protect those sales.
What impact does brand protection have on the overall business?
Rob Segall – Brand protection should be viewed as an investment and not an expense. So, when you’re working to protect your brand, the overall goal is return on investment so brand protection should be viewed as exactly that, an opportunity to regain your sales and take back what’s yours. You spend time marketing, you spend money marketing, you spend hours developing your brand and getting to the place where you want to be, obtaining those reviews, all the good stuff that made you all the money and once you obtain that success and the unauthorized sellers or the copycats or the counterfeiters start taking it away, brand protection should be used as an opportunity to regain that market share, but it should be done in a way that results in a return on your investment.
How does brand protection carry over to the customer specifically?
CJ Rosenbaum – When it comes to brand protection, it assures that your customers are getting your product, the highest quality, the full warranty that comes with it, post-sale benefits, some products require certain storage, the ability that if there is a recall that they’re going to be notified and it really protects the consumers in terms of they’re getting what they’re paying for, which builds brand loyalty.
Rob Segall – You always want to take care of the consumer, especially on platforms like Amazon that allow anyone saying they’re selling the same product to sell on the same listing. I can’t tell you how many times brand owners have come to me and said, “You know, my reviews are tanking because of these counterfeit sellers,” and it’s because counterfeit sellers are sending products to consumers and consumers are like, “Hey, this is crap,” but it’s not really what they’re supposed to be getting and obviously that results in the negative reviews that then get associated with the client’s products because of the way Amazon’s platform works. It’s really important to make sure you’re removing counterfeit sellers before the good will is taken away from what’s associated with your brand.
CJ Rosenbaum – What a lot of brands also don’t realize is that there are also significant safety issues, especially with products that have anything to do with electronics or electricity. There’s a lot of what we call parallel importing, where sellers will go out, buy genuine products meant for Europe, and then sell them here in the United States, either with the wrong power cord or with substitute aftermarket power cords and that’s a significant safety issue and it’s something that can lope in the brand’s face if there’s a fire caused, or it doesn’t perform as expected when the product is genuine. Brand protection, at least the way that we do brand protection, protects the brand’s consumers from those types of risks. They’re getting what they expect from where they expect it and they get all the benefits and all the safety features that are inherent in many products that are out there.
For more information on how to protect sales on Amazon.com, contact us.
