The thing that Jeff Bezos got wrong about advertising
The thing that Jeff Bezos got wrong...
If you have a great product, you don’t need advertising, right?
That’s what Jeff Bezos believed for years.
But then he made a 180-degree turn.
“Yes, I changed my mind,” said Bezos.
(- cue the Jeffrey Bezos song from TikTok -)
And Amazon is now the biggest advertiser in the world.
Spending 10.9 billion dollars on advertising in 2020 alone.
Mostly on creative - brain wiring - storytelling type of advertising.
Featuring Alexa, Amazon Web Services, and Bezos himself.
👉Why so?
Amazon knows that if they want to be the go-to choice for everything.
They need to be the nr 1 choice in people’s heads whenever they are in a buying situation.
👉Why so?
In buying situations, we only choose between the 2-3 brands (Amazon is a retailer brand, after all) that come to our mind first.
(Called satisficing - to avoid the pain of decision making & consideration, we settle for an easily available option)
✅So Amazon needs to build mental availability.
(Mental availability: a brand to come quickly to mind in relation to a specific need or occasion.
Ex: What's the first brand to come to mind when you think of CRMs or refreshing drinks?)
So that when people think “I need books,” they think of Amazon, car tires - Amazon, Roombas - Amazon.
For Amazon to create these mental connections, they need to create ads that they can surround people with.
Create their influence-sphere.
But not just.
They need:
A) need to create ads that get noticed & remembered.
B) make the message from those ads stick.
🎯And according to B2B Institue research, the most effective – and scalable – way to get your brand and ads noticed and remembered by future buyers is to use creative advertising.
“Creative” being something that’s so novel that it stands out from the noise. And is worth remembering after.
👉So that’s why Amazon has amped up its ad budget. 👈
It already has the easiest & fastest experience in town.
Now it’s coming for your mental space to make sure you’ll always choose their experience over everyone else’s.
PS. Creative advertising can make tiny (media) budgets work for small companies, that don’t even have 1/100000th of Amazon’s budget.
(“There are three driving forces of mental availability – budget, media selection, and creative strength.” - finds the ACA research “To ESOV and beyond”)
💪Creativity is like a growth lever. That's affordable to all.
If you create something novel, creative, and provocative, you don’t need such a vast media budget to push it.
People will remember it and share it themselves (might need a little initial push).
But it’s something most companies fail to do.
Because creativity is hard. Novelty is scary.
Attention can cause a backlash.
So everyone defaults to vanilla- unnoticeable - marketing.
And they won’t be remembered in buying situations...
Ever.