Amazon and buyer decision processes
In a bid to hold on to shoppers who typically visit YouTube and Facebook to watch product videos, Amazon is now working with major retailers to include their own promotional content in their product pages.
In the days when Amazon just sold of books, each page just contained an image of the cover and some text: complete information about it (author, ISBN, date of publication, edition, number pages, sales ranking, etc.), the opinions of readers and recommendations obtained through a collaborative filtering algorithm. Over time, more photographs of other parts of the book were added, such as the back cover or index, along with a “Look inside”, which allows users to browse a few pages. More recently, sponsored related products have been added, allowing marketers to position their products as complementary or alternative to what the customer is currently viewing.
Today, with an Amazon that sells practically everything, the inclusion of videos allows manufacturers to create a more inviting context to encourage a purchase decision. Videos can be advertising, as well as product manuals, explanations or demonstrations that are potentially very useful in the case of more complex products and that explain and help rationalize the decision to buy.
The idea is to provide brands with a way to display their products attractively while retaining Amazon’s own identity on pages where users know where everything is, and with the inclusion of new features that can differentiate their products from the competition. Enhanced Brand Content makes Amazon an important player in a market as competitive as advertising, while allowing manufacturers to place their advertising where it can be decisive: where the purchase decision is made. Once again, online gains the edge over offline: placing a screen with television commercials on the shelf of a store is not a realistic option. Amazon has tried the format, including video, on some of its own products, such as Kindle, Dash, Echo and a few others. Again, as has happened before, the company innovates by extending to third parties an idea it has previously tested.
An Amazon Premium Page like Bose’s on the US site at a cost of $500,000, gives it free rein to include all the products that the manufacturer has for sale on Amazon — an advantage for manufacturers with wider ranges, that can allocate that cost into a larger number of product lines. They include oversized images, slogans, a demo or commercial videos, a slideshow of images or even range comparisons, and they are located at the bottom of the screen under the “From the manufacturer” heading, above the standard information about the product and the customer reviews.
Some might say that for a company that already sells everything to enter a new business segment is hardly news, but for it to choose advertising at a time the sector is in crisis both online and offline: Amazon has come up with something that has a potentially important differential value, because instead of bothering people, as these kinds of formats usually are, it is located at the very point of purchase, when we might well want extra information. No one would find that advertising element intrusive, and some may even find it useful to make a purchasing decision.
At the same time, it potentially puts brands in a FOMO situation: do they want to be among the losers who have not created these improved pages for their products? Including promotional content is not a universal panacea: placing advertising on search results or next to content may help consumers at the virtual point of sale, and Amazon could have found a feature that may go down well with many manufacturers, possibly encouraging many companies to find room for it in their budgets.
(En español, aquí)
