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Tips for Maintaining Brand Consistency Across Amazon & Other Platforms
Ecommerce brands today find themselves navigating a complex marketplace landscape where a single platform like Amazon can simultaneously unlock massive revenue potential and threaten their carefully crafted brand narrative. In reality, Amazon’s marketplace is cluttered in such a way that can easily damage a brand’s message, disconnecting the company’s appearance from its core identity. This, for many brands, is their main concern with the platform, choosing not to use it at all despite its consumer reach, due to its seeming lack of control for maintaining a consistent and positive reputation long-term. What separates successful companies on Amazon from those struggling to build a cohesive brand experience isn’t just product quality or pricing strategy – it’s their ability to build and control a consistent and trustworthy brand across every product listing. This article unpacks the challenges to maintaining brand consistency across Amazon and other platforms, providing strategies for monitoring and updating listings to ensure long-term control over online brand appearance.
Challenges to Maintaining Brand Consistency on Amazon
The reluctance of established brands to fully embrace Amazon has long been a strategic “blind spot”. Take the brand Clinique, for example: for years, the cosmetics giant considered their carefully curated department store positioning as incompatible with mass merchant retailers—including Amazon. Forbes noted this reluctance, stating that Clinique “has long been reluctant to recognize any mass merchant retailer –including chain stores, Sephora, etc. – since management believed it should cater to the department store customer and serve her in those locations”. However, in March 2024, Clinique launched their Amazon Premium Beauty storefront, a pivotal moment in the brand’s history. This shift in retail strategy highlights a broader industry transformation that has been gaining traction in recent times: brands can no longer afford to view Amazon as an irrelevant sales channel but rather a critical marketplace platform to reach the modern consumer.
The consequences of Amazon marketplace neglect extend beyond missed sales opportunities but can even impact a brand’s entire perceived identity. When brands take a passive approach to selling on Amazon, they effectively surrender control of their brand narrative to the marketplace ecosystem that consists of resellers, outdated content, and even potential knockoffs. The result is an overwhelming amount of brand inconsistencies: product listings filled with potential misinformation, outdated specifications, and a disappointing customer experience. To make matters worse, this isn’t just an issue with Amazon; the perception consumers have of a brand on Amazon impacts their decision to pursue-or not pursue-the brand’s products on other channels. A fragmented brand appearance from one channel to the next leads to an inconsistent customer experience across touchpoints, and ultimately frustration and confusion toward the brand and its products. That said, it is now more important than ever for brands to have full control of their product shopping experience across all channels as this is the best way to ensure a consistent customer experience and cohesive brand appearance across all touchpoints.
How Resellers Impact Amazon Listings
Having limited – or no – resellers is a huge benefit to being able to manage listing content. For brands navigating reseller management, the obvious best-case scenario would be to not have any resellers while the next best scenario would be to only have a few authorized sellers who are not authorized to create or submit content on the detail page. Either way, control of who is selling your product on marketplace is key to being able to maintain control of listing content. Think of Amazon like Wikipedia – anyone who’s selling can submit content and Amazon chooses what it thinks the best content is for the page – not the brand.
As another example, consider a brand who once launched a product on Amazon years ago. They initially invested minimal effort, simply setting up the listing and then leaving it as is. However, as time went on, the brand and product have both evolved – maybe the product was improved, the company’s branding was updated, or the packaging materials were swapped for something more efficient. Simultaneously, as these changes were taking place, other sellers have entered the market – contributing their own product images and thus impacting the ranking and visibility of the detail page. As a result, the brand’s original listing bears little resemblance to its current product. In this scenario, customers may easily end up confused and unsure of whether they can trust the product and brand. The brand then faces a tough challenge: how can they monitor the playing field, maintain consistent control of their brand appearance across platforms, and optimize their ecommerce listings?
The Importance of Maintaining Brand Consistency Across Platforms
In today’s digital marketplace ecosystem, continued hesitation to fully engage with platforms like Amazon translates directly to missed revenue opportunities and diminished market relevance. Half of all consumer product searches now start on Amazon. The platform is no longer an optional sales channel for brands but rather a critical touchpoint for consumers in their online shopping journey. This reality is driving a significant shift in marketplace strategy. As a full-service marketplace agency, we hear from new brands nearly every day with interest in joining Amazon (and other platforms, like Walmart), knowing that the longer they are inactive on the platform, the more potential sales they are missing out on.
The integration of Amazon into a comprehensive multi-channel marketing strategy has become essential for maintaining competitive advantage. Success in today’s ecommerce landscape requires not only brand presence, but ongoing participation proving a consistent shopping experience that builds trust at every consumer touchpoint.
Online Searches Begin on Amazon
Marketplaces Managed Worldwide
Product Types Managed
Amazon Sales Managed
Take Control of Your Amazon Content
Taking control of your Amazon presence requires a strategic approach that prioritizes both immediate content optimization and long-term brand ownership. The foundation begins with dedicated resources – whether internal team members or an experienced agency partner – who can effectively manage content quality, inventory control, and advertising campaigns. Review listings and brand information to ensure representation is accurate.
The key to long-term consistency lies in continuous monitoring, addressing issues, and improving content for maximum optimization and visibility. At Brandwoven, we’ve developed a comprehensive auditing process that allows us to easily monitor client detail pages for any discrepancies – whether it be a variation issue or changes to the listing title or bullet points. Our approach allows for immediate detection and resolution of these issues through targeted case escalation or other corrective measures. By implementing this monitoring process, our brand partners can trust that their marketplace appearance remains accurate and aligned with their overall multi-channel brand strategy.
Creating a Consistent Brand Across All Platforms
Regaining control of your Amazon presence is the foundation to building a truly cohesive multi-channel brand experience. It’s important that your Amazon content mirrors the carefully crafted aesthetic and story that your brand represents on other channels, like your ecommerce website or social media platforms. When consumers encounter your brand on Amazon, they should recognize the same brand voice, values, and visual identity. This alignment creates a multiplier effect where each channel strengthens your overall market position, creating a seamless brand narrative that resonates with consumers regardless of where they encounter your product online.
Closing Takeaways
While Amazon’s marketplace can appear daunting and unattractive for some brands, its dominance in consumer product discovery makes it an indispensable channel for brands today. The platform’s influence extends beyond simple transactions – it shapes consumer perceptions, drives purchasing decisions, and ultimately impacts a brand’s visibility and sales. This is why taking control of your Amazon presence is essential.
The opportunity cost of delay grows every day. Brands that take action now and use Amazon as part of their multi-channel strategy will continue to grow as impactful brands in their industry, while those who hesitate risk losing control of their brand narrative on the world’s largest marketplace. The path forward is clear: utilize Amazon as your brand’s most powerful asset by implementing a comprehensive strategy that ensures every product listing reinforces your brand’s messaging and differentiators.
Getting Started
Ready to transform your brand’s Amazon presence? Start by conducting an audit of any current listings to identify discrepancies or other opportunities for further optimizations and improvements. If you need assistance getting started on Amazon or Walmart or just looking for help with making changes and monitoring listings long-term, Brandwoven’s team of marketplace experts would be happy to help your brand. Reach out to us today to get started with developing a customized strategy for your brand that will position you above the competition.
Frequently Asked Questions: Listing Quality & Brand Presence
Where are brands falling short in using marketplace capabilities to drive omni-channel experiences?
By far the greatest opportunity and often a miss is around content and brand representation. We talk to brands spending 7 figures annually on a website yet nothing to assure Amazon PDPs are telling the same story, despite Amazon having as much or more traffic as the D2C site. Our retail world is shrinking, so assuring every consumer touch bleeds your brand message is key to omni-channel execution.
How can I identify and fix listing errors?
Brandwoven uses automated tools to scan for errors such as missing images, incorrect titles, and price discrepancies. We manually review flagged issues and update your listings to correct any errors promptly. Our team leverages tools to quickly find listing issues and quickly make corrections through case work or edits in the backend.
How do I know if my product copy needs a refresh?
Brands should update product copy if they’ve been struggling to grow organic ranking and sales.
Brandwoven recommends utilizing every content type and opportunity that marketplaces offer to sellers, such as leveraging SEO keywords, using all bullet points, providing detailed copy that explains product benefits, and addressing any common customer complaints or questions that arise during the discovery phase.
It’s also important to note that marketplaces like Amazon host popular tentpole events throughout the year, such as Prime Day, and updating product page copy to resonate with sales events and other seasonal moments can drive further product visibility.
It’s crucial to be strategic about product copywriting. Updating product copy periodically can help to continuously optimize the listing page and ensure consistent and long-term growth.
How does Brandwoven ensure the accuracy and consistency of our product data across all listings and marketplaces?
Our expert catalog team monitors your listing accuracy through a weekly listing audit using a combination of software and manual checks to validate that our intended optimized content matches on the PDP. We can tailor the frequency of the audits or prioritize a specific set of products to audit that makes sense for your company’s needs. Not only do we audit the live PDP, but we audit the backend of the listings to ensure Amazon is holding onto the correct info. Our audit process works for multiple international markets as well.
Brand Partners
Monthly PDP Audits
Average PDP Content Accuracy Across All Active ASINs
Weeks Average turnaround time for PDP optimization