Does Amazon Dilute the Power of Brand?
Think about the things you’ve gotten from Amazon. If you’re like me, it’s a strange mix. Now, try to remember the brands of the things you purchased.
Again, if you’re like me, Amazon wanderings rarely involve brand consideration. Electronic accessories, stationary, storage containers, anything made primarily of plastic, blankets, socks, etc.; I typically have no idea what brands I’ve purchased and now own. All I know is that the reviews were good and the price was right.
David Ogilvy called a brand “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it’s advertised.” In traditional marketing, a brand carries weight. Tennis shoes should cost about $40, until there is a Nike Swoosh on them, then we’re okay paying $80. Sure I could buy the Walmart brand popcorn, but Orville Redenbacher’s is just better (in my head), so I’ll pay more.
Is the nature of Amazon squashing the importance of having a meaningful brand? And should we care?
Does the Amazon platform erase the power of brands?
There are some cases where you may type an actual brand name into the Amazon search bar, but often it is the name of a product or product category. Wool socks. USB-C charger. Google Pixel 4 phone case. Camping stove. Then, we look at ratings, and price, and if it’s Amazon Prime ready.
So what?
The truth is, brand matters less for certain categories in general. Typically, how visibly a product is consumed matters; the more visible consumption, the more brand matters to us. A phone charger sits by your bedside 24/7, so you’re unlikely to care what brand it is, as long as it works. Same with a screen-cleaning rag, a baking mat, and hot pads. But a laptop, or your shoes? Those are more visibly “consumed,” so we consider brand.
Maybe there are some deeply-offended people out there saying “how could you ever blindly buy hot pads,” but it’s not likely. The more interesting question is Amazon’s handling of and effect on the thousands of brands on their platform. Scrolling through Amazon results, you get brand fatigue, no doubt. When you can’t analyze 100 brands (because you’ve never heard of them), you just use different criteria.
A potential issue is that Amazon formed AmazonBasics, which provides a lot of those products that the no-name brands provide. AmazonBasics as a brand means “we provide the cheap but good enough stuff, on Amazon,” and now a thousand other brands are saying, “wait a minute, that’s what we wanted our brand to mean.” The problem is, AmazonBasics says it louder, because they have a recognizable brand! Is this an ethical move eby Amazon? Let’s save that for another discussion.
Brand Meaning
Any marketer will tell you that your brand should mean something, and controlling that meaning is a big part of marketing management. There is a marketing theory called the meaning transfer model, which basically states that brands capture meaning by drawing things out from culture and associating them with their brand (usually with advertising). Then, consumers who want to adopt that same meaning for themselves will purchase and consume that brand.
But on Amazon, some brands simply don’t mean anything. Let’s look at camp stoves, and see if you recognize any of the brand names: Redcamp, Gas On, Ohuhu, Jetboil, Outbound, Lixada, DZRZVD, Odoland, Sparkfire, Camplux. I went 0/10, and I like camping.
Even more interesting, some sellers have decided to forego branding altogether, in favor of just specifying what their product is! Check out this camp stove windscreen. What’s the brand? Who knows!!!
A brand would typically give me some conception of quality, durability, who uses it, etc. In that way brands can help consumers make choices. Additionally, brands can help bring meaning to our lives. But on Amazon, not so much.