Welcome to Brand Registry
Your brand building tool box
Welcome to the wonderful world of Brand Registry, Amazon’s platform to help you “Build and Protect Your Brand”. At this point, you are probably familiar with how much reselling and arbitrage happens on Amazon, and how little power that brand owners have over the process. Brand Registry is the primary tool that brand owners have to fight back against unauthorized resells and take control of their brand narrative on Amazon. Wondering how Brand Registry can help you build a brand?
Here are a few off the benefits:
A+ Content enables brands to change the product descriptions of brand owned ASINs and replace the text with image, video and text based creative.
Sponsored Brand is Amazon’s ad unit exclusively available to brand owners. The module can feature a logo, custom headline and can feature up to three of your listings.
Amazon Store, aka your Brand Store is your store-within-a-store on Amazon. Sephora has a store within Macy’s, this is your store within Amazon.
Brand Analytics is a treasure trove of data including search terms, customer data and customer behavior reports.
Brand and IP Protection provide brand owners with a powerful set of tools to let you find and report suspected violations with a self-service platform.
Through the rest of the post, we’ll show you how to get the most possible out of these exclusive Brand Registry benefits.
How to Get Started
Before you can get reap the benefits of Brand Registry let’s review the eligibility requirements…
Trademark Registration Number: Your brand name needs to have either an active or pending text or image-based government-registered trademark number. This is not as daunting as it sound. The good news is that Amazon accepts trademarks that have been issued by governments across the world including the United States, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, India, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Singapore, Spain, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Poland, Egypt, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and the United Arab Emirates.
Product Categorization: You will need to provide a list of product categories in which the brand should be listed. This is may seem superfluous, but helps to protect your listings from imitation and malicious actors.
Now that you are armed with the required information, you will need to sign into Brand Registry with you Seller or Vendor Central credential (Note: Brand Registry applications must be submitted by the trademark owner.) and submit the information outlined above. At this point you are stuck in a waiting game while Amazon verifies the provided information. Want to get started? You can apply here.
What is A+ Content?
A+ content is a tool that enables brands to change the ‘product description’ section of your owned-ASINs to a visually compelling image. With this tool, you are able to articulate the differentiating qualities of your listing while telling a compelling story about your brand. Need additional tips on creating amazing A+ content, here are a few:
Focus on the products value proposition. Explain the need, want or problem that your product solves and scream that from the roof tops.
Is your product overly complex? Is it too hard to explain those benefits in a 200-character bullet? A+ content is where you can make a listing shine.
Show your product in a action. A big benefit of A+ content is the ability to show video assets and have examples of people using the product in everyday situation.
Need more information on A+ content? You should check out this post on Creating a Great Amazon Listing.
Sponsored Brands - Amazon PPC
Note: This section was borrowed from the previously published, “Amazon PPC: An Introduction to Advertising on Amazon”
The Sponsored Brand ad unit was originally developed as a way to appease brand marketers. The initial goal of SB was to help brands get more content into the shopping experience and have their ad units stand out from the shit show that is Sponsored Products. There are two primarily ad units across three placements. The classic Sponsored Brand ad unit (aka Sponsored Brand Headline) is shown at the top of a search results page with a three product carousel, a brand logo and an optional tagline…the other SB placement occurs at the bottom of a search results page as a standalone brand logo.
A key differentiator for the ad format and an attribute that makes it unique, is the fact that you can drive traffic to your Brand Store. You brand store is effective your Home Page on Amazon and is a great vehicle to drive exposure for a portfolio of product.
Here is an example of a top-of-search Sponsored Brand placement.
This this top of search placement typically trades at a 30% premium to your Sponsored Products cost per click. This means that if you were willing to bid $10 to will the first spot within sponsored products, you would typically need at least a $13 bid to secure the sponsored brand placement. Why is this unit so expensive? Classic supply and demand. There are only two sponsored brand placements on the page and sellers will fight it out to secure this prime real estate.
The other Sponsored Brand placement is Sponsored Brand Video (SBV). If Sponsored Brand is the homely cheerleader, SBV is the prom queen. There is only 1 opportunity to win the Sponsored Brand Video ad unit and tremendous competition for the real estate. One (obvious) challenge for smaller brands is the development of a SBV video asset. We’ll cover inexpensive ways to develop content in another post, but you can use animation rather than full production and UGC is your friend. Better news - Amazon might make a video for you….if your spend warrants their investment. Enough with my banter - here is an example of the ad unit.
While this might seem like any other ad unit, Sponsored Brand has been shown to improve brand recall metrics, build average over value through improved cross selling and is a major driver of developing cookies pools to fuel retargeting and other re-marketing based campaigns.
Benefits of an Amazon Store
Think of your brand store as your home on Amazon. A place for you to have a branded storefront to merchandise and promote your brand while providing an optimized shopping experience for your customer.
We first need to understand how customers navigate to a brand store. There are two general ways that customers are able to navigate to your store; through a Sponsored Brand ad unit or by clicking link under the product title. Examples of each our embedded below.
Once a customer clicks either of those links they will find themselves on a brand’s Store Page.
In this instance, Tide is taking a minimalist approach to their storefront. Why - because every man, woman and child already knows of Tide as a brand, and the goal of the this page is to provide some value-add content (save $150 per year…) and to get customers to their desired product as quickly as possible. Now — Let’s assume that you are not the brand manager for Tide and don’t have nearly the same level of brand awareness.
Below is a better example of a robust Brand Store. Unlike tide, INDO BOARD is a niche brand focused on balance boards with considerably less brand awareness. INDO’s Store brings the essence and character of the brand front and center to build an emotional connection with potential customers. The icons and snackable pieces of content function to make customers more comfortable with their balance boards and build trust and affinity with the brand. What is missing from the page? Not much - the page educates customers on the brand, and quickly funnels users to product and guided into a shopping experience. This is great UX (user experience) and an ideal landing experience for prospecting-based campaign where the focus is driving new customers into the brand.
Amazon Brand Analytics
Surprisingly, the worst part of selling on Amazon *is not* all of the fees, the pay for play nature of the platform or the flippant nature of most seller support reps. It’s the fact that you as a seller do not own custody of the consumer. Amazon is not in the data-sharing business, and while improvements are being made, the demographic and shopping behavior that you may capture on your DTC store is not available on Amazon.
However, all hope is not lost, and that is where Brand Analytics comes into play. Brand Analytics is a benefit offered to brand owners and is a reporting suite that contains data and insights that can help brand owners make strategic decisions about their marketing strategy. Wonder what is available? Let’s take a look…
Amazon Search Terms - most everything on Amazon is based off of a keyword, and finding the right keywords is a major driver of success. Amazon’s Search Term module is where you can find those keywords and understand the most common terms within your category. Say that you sell camping tents, here is an example of how to use the tool. Not only does the tool show the most common phrases for any keywords containing the word ‘tent’, it also shows the click share and conversion share for the top three ASINs which is a gold mine for competitive intelligence.
Repeat Purchase Rate - We are now getting closer to actual CRM based data! The repeat purchase rate provides a robust snapshot of consumer behavior at both the brand (your business as whole) and ASIN level (individual product). This data is a critical driver of marketing strategy and understanding your customer LTV or Lifetime Value.
Market Basket Analysis - Ever wonder what else you can sell to your current customers? Or are you looking to develop a limited time bundle, but are unsure of the right items to put together? This is where you find the right items. The basket analysis report will show the most commonly occur in the same basket.
Note: Image compliments of ecomcrew.com
Item Comparison and Alternative Purchase Behavior - This report is a great source of competitive intelligence. With this data, you are able to the products most frequently viewed together with yours in addition to customers' final choice after viewing your product. Wonder why you are leaking sales — use this report to find why customers are buying a competitor of your listing.
Demographics - Not sure of who your customer really is? Do you over index with women? You might want to update your creative? Are most of your customers between 18-24, you might want to work on the verbiage of your bullets.
Brand Protection and Intellectual Property Detection
Launching a brand is a massive undertaking and few things are as frosting as seeing someone devalue something that you built with your own sweat equity. This is where Brand Registry brand protection comes into play. If another seller on the platform is using your trademark or providing customers with inaccurate information about your brand this is your place to turn.
Brand protection fall into three general areas. First is assigning ownership over your listing — this ensures the accuracy of listings to help you better mage the content and narrative that you are presenting to customers. The second benefit of Brand Registry is proactive brand protection where Amazon will proactively remove suspected infringements or inaccurate content through machine learning. Finally - like most areas of Amazon, they provide you with a self-service solution to find and report suspected violations.
Is Brand Registry Worth the Hassle?
Yes! I wouldn’t have written >1,900 words if it was trash.If you have a private label seller you absolutely should enroll in Brand Registry
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Another top quality post! Always wondered about brand ads. You definitely won’t find this content in any gurus course, believe me as I have had access to many courses.