Key Takeaways
- If people describe your brand wrong, that is a messaging problem, not an attention problem. I spent years being called the t-shirt guy in Kansas City while running an Amazon agency, and the fix was changing what I published, not correcting people.
- A story does the one thing a feature list cannot: it tells the buyer what to conclude. A beautiful lifestyle photo that does not say what you want the shopper to take away is decoration.
- Say your positioning in words your audience already owns. Nothing landed until I said I accelerate brands on Amazon, because everyone already knows what a brand is and what an accelerator does.
- Small brands out-story big ones because they care, not because they outspend. Large brands were onboarded early, went live, and then left the listing alone while smaller sellers learned the platform.
- Your Amazon page is read as a credential by people who are not shopping. Retail buyers and other marketplaces look at your reviews and your rank before they decide whether to take you seriously.
In October 2021 I recorded episode 3 of The Longer Game with Michael Maher, Chief Idea Officer at Cartology. The episode is called "Brand, Brand, Brand". Michael is putting it back in front of people through the show's new newsletter, which is a fair test of any episode: does it survive five years.
Most of what we say about e-commerce has a shelf life measured in months. Amazon ships a feature and everybody re-learns their job. This one held up, and I think I know why. It is not about a feature. It is about why anybody remembers you.
The t-shirt guy problem
Before Marknology was the whole job, I had an apparel company called Landlocked. I advertised it hard around Kansas City, and it worked well enough that people started introducing me as the t-shirt guy.
That bothered me for longer than I want to admit. The work I was proudest of was the Amazon work. I was building listings that converted at rates you cannot get anywhere else, and nobody in my own city seemed to notice. My internal reaction was that people were not paying attention.
They were paying perfect attention. They were reading exactly what I was publishing, and what I was publishing was t-shirts.
I said this on the episode and I still believe it is the most useful sentence in it: so many times we are annoyed that someone is not getting the message, and really it is on us that we sent the wrong one.
The analogy I reached for was Cesar Millan, the dog trainer. His whole point is that he is not training the dog. The dog is fine. He is training the human, because the human is giving off signals they do not know they are giving. Your customers are the same. They are responding accurately to what you actually put in front of them, which is not always what you meant.
So I stopped being irritated and started being deliberate. I split my personal brand away from my business brands and let each one tell its own story instead of letting all of it leak through one social feed. It took a while. Eventually, in Kansas City, "Amazon" started meaning my name.
Why does the phrasing matter more than the message?
There is a second half to that story that people usually skip.
For years I tried to describe what Marknology does. I went through a lot of clever one-word framings and none of them landed. People would nod and then ask a question that proved they had not understood a thing.
What finally worked was boring: I accelerate brands on Amazon. A brand accelerator. That is it.
It worked because both halves were already installed in the listener. Everyone knows what a brand is. Everyone knows what an accelerator does. I was not asking them to learn a new concept, I was asking them to combine two they already owned. Donald Miller's StoryBrand work is what pushed me toward that, and it is the part of branding that most brands get backwards. They invent vocabulary and then spend money teaching it.
The test is simple. Say your positioning to someone outside your industry. If they have to ask a clarifying question, the words are wrong, even if the strategy underneath them is right.
What does a brand story look like on a product page?
Here is where this stops being philosophy.
Brands send me beautiful photography all the time. A woman holding a baby, perfect light, real production budget behind it. And my honest reaction as a shopper is: what do you want me to get out of this? Do you want me to pick up babies? Am I supposed to smile because it is cute?
If you cannot say the sentence you want the shopper to think after they look at an image, that image is decoration. It might be gorgeous decoration. It is still not doing a job. Every asset on a listing should carry one line of the story, and you should be able to name which line before you shoot it. That is the entire discipline behind our content creation and listing optimization work. I take the image side of it slot by slot in what actually changes the click.
There is a reason this matters more on Amazon than on your own site, and it is a point about intent. On a website, converting two or three percent of visitors is a good day. On Amazon I have seen listings convert at thirty percent, because the person arriving has already decided most of it somewhere else. They read a roundup, they saw a creator use it, a friend named it. They are not on Amazon to be persuaded from zero. They are there to confirm.
That reframes the job. The story mostly gets built off Amazon. The listing either confirms it in about three seconds or contradicts it. A page full of feature bullets and a stock photo contradicts it, because it reads like a commodity, and the person who arrived believing they were buying something specific quietly stops believing that.
Why do small brands out-story large ones?
The thing that still makes me passionate about this is watching brands with real equity throw it away on the biggest shelf in the world.
The history explains it. Large brands got approached by Amazon reps early on. It was easy, they went up, and then they left it. Amazon shipped brand feature after brand feature and nothing happened on those accounts, because Amazon was tertiary and somebody else's problem. Meanwhile smaller and mid-sized brands were never invited. They wanted to be there, so they learned the platform, and they leaned on it because it was the only shelf they could reach without paying for placement.
On the episode I brought up G Mama's Cookies, a small brand out of Arkansas with a few SKUs, showing up ahead of the household cookie names on a broad category search. Nobody outspent Nabisco. They just showed up and told the story while the big names did not bother.
In a grocery store, money buys you the shelf, the placement, the broker, and the inventory to fill it. On Amazon the shelf is handed to everybody. Once the shelf is free, the differentiator is whether you have anything to say, which is why brand management on Amazon is a growth function and not a housekeeping one.
Who else is reading your Amazon listing?
This one has only gotten more true since we recorded.
It used to run one direction. You got into Target, and Amazon called you because you were in Target. Now I watch it run backwards. I have had brands grow on Amazon and then land grocery and specialty retail conversations off the back of it. Chewy sizes what it orders partly against your Amazon volume. Buyers pull up your listing before a meeting the way they would pull up a reference.
So the reviews and the rank are not only sales metrics. They are social proof aimed at people who are not shopping. A buyer can read five hundred customers in a minute and decide whether your brand is real, which is why review strategy is brand work and not a post-launch chore. That is a credential you cannot fake and cannot buy, and it is one of the strongest arguments for treating Amazon as the anchor of your multi-marketplace presence rather than an afterthought channel.
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Frequently asked questions
What is a brand story in e-commerce?
It is the single thing you want a customer to conclude about you, expressed consistently everywhere they meet you. It is not your founding history and it is not a paragraph on an about page. If your images, your bullets, your storefront and your ads all point at the same conclusion, you have a brand story. If each one points somewhere slightly different, you have a feature list with good photography.
How do I know my brand story is not landing?
Ask people outside your business to describe what you sell in one sentence, and listen to the answer without correcting it. If they describe you as something adjacent to what you actually do, that gap is the whole problem, and it is yours to fix. People are usually reading your signals accurately. The signals are wrong.
Do small brands need a brand story, or just better ads?
Ads buy you the impression. The story decides what happens in the three seconds after it. Small brands have an advantage here because a clear point of view is free and shelf placement is not, which is how a few SKUs from a small brand end up above household names on a broad search term.
Where does the brand story actually live on an Amazon listing?
Mostly in the images and the storefront, because that is what people look at. The main image says what it is, the secondary images each carry one claim, and A+ content carries the reason to trust the brand behind it. The written bullets support the story, they do not deliver it. If you can name the line of story each image is responsible for, the listing is built correctly.
Is brand advice from a 2021 podcast still relevant?
The tactical parts of e-commerce expire fast. This does not, because it describes how people decide rather than how a platform works. The specific tools have changed since we recorded, and the mechanism has not: a shopper gives you a few seconds, and either they can tell what you are or they move on.
What to take from this
- Ask five people outside your business what you sell. Their sentence is your brand, not the one on your website.
- Rewrite your positioning using words your audience already owns. If it needs a clarifying question, it is not finished.
- Run every image through one test. Name the sentence you want the shopper to think after seeing it. If you cannot, the image is decoration.
- Decide which channel builds the story and which one confirms it. Most brands are trying to persuade from zero on the page where people arrive already convinced.
- Treat the listing as a credential. Retail buyers and marketplace partners are reading it, and they are not there to buy one unit.
Thanks to Michael Maher and the Cartology team for having me on, and for putting the episode back out. You can find the rest of my podcast appearances on Drew on Air, including Chris McCabe on competitors who use Amazon against you and Hai Mag on the Meta ad we almost turned off. If your brand is doing everything right and people still describe you as something you are not, start with what you are publishing before you blame anyone for not listening.