With over 5 million sellers…

The fierce competition between online retailers on Amazon can be really stifling and overwhelming. This is not to mention the vicious counterfeiting practices by copycats and other pirates from the underworld who want to rip off the goodwill and reputation of your business name.

Is it even possible to distinguish yourself from the thousands of voices of Amazon sellers in the same category or to even protect your products and sales from being slavishly ripped off by online scammers?

The short and simple answer is yes!

Did you know that there are 310 million estimated active customers on Amazon. This figure represents a large market that could potentially bring huge profits to a recognized seller who knows his target audience within the pool and how to attract them to his products.

Here are your free tips for pulling it off…

To create a genuine, long-lasting brand, one of the first steps is to perform extensive and intensive research on the Amazon marketplace.

What you should be researching?

  • Target audience: Information on purchasing habits of people who are  readily interested in your category of product listings, potential customers and new leads on Amazon, social media pages and email listings.
  • Preferred features: What do customers prefer about your product listings. Research shows that 90% of Amazon consumers would not purchase items with less than a three star rating. There would also be shipping preferences, fulfillment preferences, etc.
  • Competitors: Study the branding, colors, fonts, logos, selling points, special features, and offers of existing brands and top sellers.  The information you glean from competitor research will help you know what is, perhaps, too trendy.  Chart a path on how you can be distinct from your competitors.
  • Your Brand: Here, you pen down the abstracts of what you want to achieve. Consider the product branding you want to create.  What colors, logo, fonts, and features on Amazon are best adaptable to your products?

Create a Brand Strategy!

Branding on Amazon can be an easy job if you have concrete plans. Having completed your research, you can begin to chart your course to create a classic brand. There is literally no big brand today without a brand strategy (think Coke’s “One Brand”).

Your brand strategy should be fully fleshed out and thorough, which will form the groundwork for your brand identity. Elements you should include in your product branding strategy:

  •    Brand voice
  •    Brand style
  •    Colors
  •    Logo
  •    Tagline
  •    Fonts/Typography
  •    Brand messaging architecture
  •    Product listing style guide (your method of naming and listing new products)
  •    Picture quality
  •    Special offers on products
  •    Shipping policies (especially if you are not an FBA subscriber)
  •    TOS on return and replacement of products

And of course, your trademark.

Keep in mind that your trademark is just one element of your overall brand strategy!

The end product of your strategy should be a Creative Brief. Then you are set to engage the visual elements to bring alive the brand you have created. Visual elements will include the words you use in describing your products, taglines and so on.

Create and Implement a Proactive Brand Protection Plan!

Four days before it launched the iPhone, Apple began its applications to patent its designs. This is the reason they were awarded up to $539 million in damages for infringement by Samsung.

Lesson? You do not wait for your products to be counterfeited or ripped off before you protect your brand. Be proactive when comes to the protection of your intellectual property.

I promise, while it might seem expensive now, being proactive is much less expensive than being reactive. Plus, you’ll sleep better at night!

You might not have anything eligible for patent protection, but you certainly have a brand name you’ll want to protect via trademark registration, and beautiful one of a kind products you’ll want to protect via copyright registration..

Bonus Tip:  Pay attention to SEO and Reviews on your Product Listings!

FeedbackExpress reports that there are 1,761,784 sellers have Amazon product listings as of 2017, and 1,029,528 have joined in 2018. A huge number. How do you get visibility above other sellers to get the attention of an estimated 1. 79 billion users (Statista, 2018) who use online search engines to find products (Adeptmind reports 46.7% of U.S. searches on Amazon and 34.6% on Google)? The answer is simple – Search Engine Optimization. Engaging SEO on your product listings, specifications, social media pages, and blogs will significantly increase your brand publicity.

FeedbackExpress also reports that 9,644,400 seller feedback reviews are left monthly on all Amazon marketplaces and as pointed out earlier, 90% of customers would not purchase a product with less than 3-star ratings. Hence, your customer reviews are essential to generating new leads for your products and establishing a top class brand.

Product branding on Amazon requires focus, research, strategy and overall protection.

However, with the right guide, you can get it right. Grow and protect your brand today!

Apply to work with Suzi!

Posted in Amazon, Brand Protection, Solid Trademark Foundation, Trademark Basics

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