An Interview with Rose Hamilton

A master at growing CPG sales through omnichannel platforms, Rose Hamilton is the founder and CEO of Compass Rose Ventures. Over the past 20+ years, she has helped 30+ private equity firms and consumer brands to build, scale, and fund consumer brands, delivering over $1 billion in incremental sales.

As a Netrush advisor, Rose works with brands on omnichannel strategies to maximize growth across DTC, Amazon, emerging marketplaces, and brick & mortar retail. We sat down with her to get her thoughts on how brands can navigate the complex, omnichannel landscape that is increasingly critical to growth and success.

Can you describe where Amazon fits into an omnichannel strategy?

Amazon is hands down the dominant player in ecommerce today. They have perfected an incredibly powerful engine and ecosystem that drives massive transaction volume for consumers and sellers. Consumers today go to Amazon by default to search for and purchase products and see reviews. It’s become a very powerful and indispensable discovery channel. Amazon is such a big part of consumers’ lives that brands really must have a presence there to achieve maximum visibility, even if you don’t directly want to sell your products on Amazon. To continue scaling, DTC brands need a strong presence on the platform.

It’s also important to realize that Amazon can provide significant and valuable data and insight into your customers that you may not be able to acquire elsewhere. However, we all know that the Amazon customer will likely stay with Amazon, and your ability to establish and grow a one-to-one relationship with customers acquired through the channel can be very challenging. At the end of the day, it is crucial for brands to form those 1:1 connections with consumers to differentiate from competitors and build brand loyalty and community. Channel diversity is important to hedge against technical or policy changes that may be deployed by giants like Amazon that could negatively affect brand performance.

So, how do you balance all that?

In order to scale a consumer brand, it becomes important to create content and insights that are deployed and leveraged across all platforms. Each platform provides unique brand insights to inform innovation when analyzing content, competition, category, and the customer. A holistic perspective across all marketing programs has never been more important. That’s where Netrush comes in. We have the tools and expertise to audit what brands are doing both on and off Amazon to help crack the code on optimizing ecommerce for emerging and established consumer businesses. The aggregation of cross-platform data into insights empowers our clients to make better, more informed decisions as they optimize investments in their brand’s ecommerce ecosystem. How many marketing dollars should you put towards retail? Where do you most effectively direct your Google Ads spend? How can you leverage Amazon to drive into retail? It’s a very dynamic and competitive ecosystem, and the brands that are doing really well are leveraging data from all platforms to perfect their brand and commercial planning.

?What are the really successful brands doing to take full advantage of all the options?

Successful brands are focused on building communities and deeply engaging and listening to people. They have strong positioning and a powerful and consistent storytelling architecture. Strong brands transcend beyond their products and solutions by identifying and emotionally connecting through shared values between the brand and their community.? New customers can be attracted on TikTok, Instagram, Amazon, Pinterest, and so many other platforms, but it’s the messaging that makes the marketing investment efficient. The most successful brands focus on developing an engagement strategy unique to each platform that seeks to foster deep emotional connections that resonate with their target customers.

You talk a lot about brand storytelling, do you see Amazon as a good platform for those stories?

Amazon has built an incredibly personalized ecommerce experience, but the tools and capabilities for immersive storytelling are fairly generic. Effective brands typically back their Amazon footprint with their own dedicated web presence where they have the ability to have more control over the look and feel of their positioning. Most of the time, consumers are looking for something specific on Amazon. But when they’re searching, other products, including competing products tend to show up that they’re not expecting. Once a consumer identifies a new brand, they are likely to go directly to a brand-specific website, which typically deploys deeper and richer storytelling and supports immersive brand-building that is difficult to achieve on Amazon. For example, if you have a company that has a portfolio of 20 beauty products, consumers see them one at a time on Amazon. This makes it difficult for brands to promote the brand story, how all the products fit together, or the differentiation behind the products. Efforts should be made to extend a brands’ story into the Amazon presence and make it easy and obvious for consumers to click through to a company-owned and controlled experience for deeper knowledge sharing and a more immersive experience.

So how much does creativity matter on Amazon?

Compelling, relevant, and creative messaging is always important. Quality imagery and reviews also make an enormous difference in conversion. When a brand has taken the time to create quality content, with solid positioning and a compelling engagement narrative, consumers are much more likely to gain trust in a brand and purchase. Reviews also play a significant role in conversion, as we all know.

You mentioned that Amazon is now delivering higher-quality data. How does that translate to shopping that’s not on the platform?

The key is having the right packaging and the right assortment in each channel for maximum conversion by channel. On Amazon, you might carry a core product assignment assortment, but in your own DTC channel, you might have an expanded assortment and services that are really exclusive. The brand may also offer a different bundle and package in a retail channel. If you maintain the same assortment everywhere, it doesn’t really matter where people transact. If you know enough about your Amazon customer, you’re going to bundle in a way that caters to their needs in the channel so that you can create a package with maximum value. But that might be quite different from another channel. A differentiated strategy by the platform has the potential to increase lifetime value and wallet share.

?Final question, what role does brand protection play in this?

Ensuring that your products are sold and fulfilled through legitimate and reliable sources is very important due to the impact poor customer experiences can have on a brand’s reputation. Many brands, with limited time and resources, don’t have the bandwidth or expertise to properly protect and monitor their brand's performance and evaluate their customers' satisfaction levels. It’s wise for these companies to consider leveraging outside help and advisory services to ensure that their products are presented and fulfilled with quality and integrity and that their customers are satisfied.?