Amazon Vendor Unpacked: Is Your Amazon Business Growing, or Just Keeping Up?
You can spend months making sure a licensed character looks exactly right on a box. The colours are approved, the artwork is signed off and the packaging follows the brand guidelines. Then a customer searches for that same character on Amazon and finds a jumble of products with no obvious route through them.
That gap is what stayed with me after speaking to Asha Bhalsod for Amazon Vendor Unpacked. We put enormous effort into protecting how a brand appears on a product. Are we putting the same effort into how people discover and shop that brand?
Asha, founder of Etopia Consultancy and co-founder of Women in Amazon Business, brings experience from both Amazon and the brands trading with it. Our conversation explored Amazon brand management, licensing and the particular pressures facing toys and games. For me, the biggest question was about ownership: when several businesses contribute to one brand’s success, who takes responsibility for the whole customer experience?
Watch the full Amazon Vendor Unpacked conversation
A licensing agreement needs an Amazon conversation
In a licensing relationship, the licensor owns the intellectual property and grants another business permission to use it. The licensee develops and sells products under that agreement. One character might appear across toys, clothing, bedding and lunchboxes, produced by several different businesses.
Each licensee has a commercial reason to promote its own range. But the customer sees a character they love, rather than a collection of separate licensing relationships. They might want a birthday present, a bedroom makeover or a few ideas to send to grandparents.
If every business concentrates on its own products, the wider shopping journey can fall between them. Everyone has a listing and a sales target, but nobody has joined the dots.
Asha’s view is that licensors should take responsibility for building brand awareness on Amazon, while licensees drive demand for their products. I think that distinction gives businesses a useful starting point. It creates a conversation about shared assets, investment and accountability before individual teams start pulling in different directions.
Otherwise, you can end up with a brand that looks carefully managed everywhere except the place where someone is about to buy it.
Customers should not have to decode your catalogue
One of Asha’s examples was a parent looking for products featuring their child’s favourite character. It is a familiar shopping mission, and a revealing one. How easy would it be to find a coherent selection of relevant products, understand the range and choose something suitable?
An Amazon Brand Store can give shoppers a dedicated destination with products and brand content organised in one place. Amazon describes Stores as a way to showcase a range and help customers discover the brand. That makes them useful to this conversation, provided the experience is planned around what customers need.
A store organised around gifting, age groups or product interests could be more helpful than one that simply mirrors internal product divisions. The customer’s question is probably “What would they love?” rather than “Which licensee manufactured this?”
My take is that brand consistency has to extend beyond matching logos and colours. It should make the shopping experience easier to navigate. A beautiful destination still needs a useful route through it.
That means looking at your Amazon presence through the eyes of someone who has never seen your range plan, attended your licensing meeting or read your brand guidelines. Can they find what they need without doing the detective work themselves?
Brand protection needs someone responsible for it
The conversation also touched on counterfeit products and Amazon Brand Registry. Amazon’s programme provides tools to help rights owners protect intellectual property, manage listings and report suspected infringement.
Those tools need people and processes behind them. Who monitors potential problems? Who can access the relevant account? Who gathers evidence, submits reports and follows up? Who makes sure the right partners are involved?
For a licensed brand, those questions can become complicated because several organisations have a stake in the outcome. Leaving responsibilities unclear creates room for delays and repeated handovers.
I would want brand protection included in the same discussion as content and advertising. They all contribute to the experience customers encounter. Someone needs a clear view of that experience and the authority to get problems addressed.
Having access to a tool is a beginning. Making it part of how the business operates is where the work happens.
Your advertising plan needs a shared destination
Asha challenged the assumption that investing in brand awareness elsewhere automatically covers what needs to happen on Amazon. A campaign might make a character more desirable, but the next step matters: what happens when that interest becomes a search?
If the imagery is inconsistent, the range is difficult to browse or key products are unavailable, some of that demand may be harder to convert into a purchase.
This is where I think the conversation becomes particularly useful. Businesses can spend considerable time discussing how to generate demand, then give far less attention to the experience waiting for it.
An Amazon brand strategy needs coordination between licensors and licensees. Brand campaigns and product campaigns can serve different purposes, but they should work towards an agreed customer journey. Teams need to discuss the assets, destinations, product availability and measures of success together.
The useful question is: when our wider marketing creates interest, have we made it easy for someone to act on it here?
Peak season exposes the gaps
Toys and games add another layer of pressure. Asha described the nerve required when stock is ready but Amazon orders have yet to arrive, alongside the challenge of promotions elsewhere in retail affecting the pricing environment on Amazon.
That makes preparation especially valuable. A peak trading period is a difficult time to discover that imagery is awaiting approval, nobody owns a store update or the advertising plan depends on products that are not available.
From an operations perspective, this is where the brand conversation meets the practical work of selling to Amazon. Demand generation, stock planning and fulfilment need to support one another. A campaign cannot do its job effectively if the purchase and delivery experience cannot keep up.
For licensors and licensees preparing for peak, I would start with five questions:
- Who owns the overall Amazon brand experience?
- Which assets and approvals do partners need, and when?
- Where will brand campaigns send customers?
- How will product availability inform campaign decisions?
- Who monitors content and brand protection issues?
The answers should be clear before the pressure builds. “We thought they were handling it” is an expensive discovery when your biggest trading window is already underway.
Give the whole experience an owner
What I took from this conversation is that Amazon deserves a place in the wider brand and retail strategy, with clear responsibilities across the businesses involved.
A licensor can set the direction. Licensees can contribute product knowledge and execution. Together, they can create a shopping experience that makes sense to the person buying.
The first step is a simple one: search for your brand and follow the journey as a customer would. Where do you land? What is clear? What feels disconnected? Then ask who has responsibility for fixing it.
If the answer is difficult to pin down, you have found a useful place to start.