Marketplaces are great – they create enormous market exposure at a product level, and reach huge audiences. However, all too often they become a race to the bottom. As such, even official brand representation on marketplaces undercuts RR. From a consumer’s perspective, that’s good – the same items, cheaper. But what of the brand? They’re now selling products cheaper than they want to, and have little to no brand representation. There’s no opportunity to differentiate beyond cold, hard product information. 

Some marketplaces allow for an amount of visual branding, like smaller banners or stylised ‘areas’: eBay's and Amazon’s branded stores being obvious examples.

But they’re still very much platform experiences. So, while the brand name is seen as the seller, they can appear identical to other third-party vendors at a product page level. The brand is lost. 

Working with platform experience dashboards can provide valuable insight to how customers are shopping your brand’s products on the marketplace platform. Ordinarily we’d expect to see very different  patterns of behaviour and less brand loyalty – remembering that customers go to marketplaces to get lower prices, and more choice.  

 

Understand each touchpoint of the brand ecosystem, and how those work in combination. From product images shot in the style of your brand, create shoppable Pinterest content, or enable split panel images on Twitter.  

 

Most brands have a style of lifestyle imagery which complements but also contextualises their products and those product shots. Language, product naming conventions and colour can all also be valid differentiators. 

Be flexible and don’t refuse to recognise that you may be talking to your customers on these platforms. The mindset and tasks are different, and may well benefit from a different approach. This should be seen as not brand dilution, but brand extension. The UNLIMITED Human Understanding Lab works on many similar extensions across a multitude of sectors, and we see great results from behavioural science, neuroscience and data science combined to really understand  those customer states both in both on and off-brand experiences, ultimately leading to conversion. Accepting that the stages are not equal is paramount. 

 

Consider the lifecycle from awareness to consumption. A product may appear in literally hundreds or thousands of digital platforms other than your brand’s website. The packaging, links through to instructions  or video tutorials are all opportunities to re-capture that customer and reinforce the brand that they may be totally unaware of. Always  offer unique benefits to shopping directly – specific or flexible bundles, flexible subscriptions, savings, coupons, loyalty schemes etc can all be reasons for customers to convert from marketplace customers to D2C consumers.