Hey, this is Daniel Audunsson here. And in this video, I want to share with you why you must have a genuine strategic advantage to build a very successful physical products brand on Amazon. And I'm going to show you how to do this. This is especially important if you want to have a highly profitable business. You can succeed without the strategic advantage, but if you want to have excellent profit margins and make this business a lot more successful for you, then what I’m about to share with you in this video is absolutely key.
To start with, I want to mention that I'll be the first one to agree with you that Amazon is in many ways a lot more saturated than before. When I got started in 2012, it was like a walk in the park. Even just doing private labeling was a massive strategic advantage in and of itself because almost no one else was doing it at that time on Amazon. Most third-party sellers were just wholesaling other people's brands, and they did not focus on the marketing side of things. They did not control their own listings on Amazon and that whole game was brand new.
It was kind of like being alone in a desert and you were the only one that was really alive in there, so it was pretty easy. But keep in mind that it was only easy for those that were this one step ahead of everyone else and had the insights and knowledge to actually do private labeling because most sellers simply didn't have a clue about it or that it was even possible. And keep in mind that there wasn't really anyone teaching us how to do this properly either, so we had to learn and figure things out on our own. And that’s not easy.
Today for a lot of products, when you're private labeling, it's like you're inside a dense jungle. There are so many other sellers selling the exact same thing that you are, and it may seem like it's really hard to find a good opportunity and win because of all the other sellers and because of all the competition. But this does not mean we can't be just as successful if not more successful than, say, five years ago. Things have definitely changed but in many ways, it has also changed for the better. For example, there is way more volume on Amazon today than when I got started seven years ago, way more. And a lot of things have become much easier and more accessible. And this trend will continue. The key is to adapt to it.
The hardest truth for anyone in business in my opinion is the reality of competition. So it's important we address this point here right away. What is the reality of competition? What do I mean by that? The reality of competition is that it never ends. It just keeps coming at you and it never lets up. In fact, it tends to become more and more intense especially with things that work and have potentially huge rewards such as selling on Amazon.
Now, this is an uncomfortable fact for many people because they don't want to deal with that and they don't want to fight for things. So, what do you do? How do you actually win and defeat your competition because it is there and for anything good, it's going to be there. If it's not there from day one, it's going to get there really quickly. So trying to avoid competition is not the answer. You have to learn to actually defeat your competition and win.
Well, what you have to do is you must have a genuine competitive advantage. No hack or tool or shortcut will let you escape that fact. You must have a way to get ahead and stay ahead of the competition. The good news is when you do this right, you can actually break away from the competition and create a gap that becomes very hard to catch up with. Just think about the largest brands in the world such as Coca-Cola. This happens all the time in tens of thousands of niches and it can happen for your brand too.
So now let's talk about how you can actually gain a competitive advantage when selling your own branded products on Amazon. The first thing I want to mention is that it all starts with you, okay? You have got to be relentless and never let go. One thing I can tell you for sure is that the most obvious thing that separates the big winners from the rest is their ability to focus, believe and keep on improving every single day. In other words, it's your mindset that turns you into a perpetual winner or a loser.
I realize mindset is such an over-used term, so its meaning gets diluted. But to me it's first and foremost about your competitive nature, meaning do you give up in the face of competition or do you fight to figure things out and win? In other words, do you fight to stay ahead of the competition? Improvement isn't easy or comfortable which is why most people stop at a certain point. But you must never stop improving if you want to defeat the competition.
On that note, the second thing that's really important to understand here is that you must be at least one step ahead of the pack. And the only way to do that is to constantly improve. When you feel like things are over-saturated, so to speak, it's another way of saying you don't know how to play this game and win.
Just imagine you're playing basketball and you just keep on losing the ball, your shots keep getting blocked and you feel like you can't get anywhere. But I guarantee there's going to be another player on that field that's just crushing it. Why? Well, he's better at this game than you are, that's why.
What I can promise you is this, if you're going to copy what everyone else is doing and act like a "monkey see monkey do" type of entrepreneur, you are always going to feel like things are saturated because you won't have any advantage over the competition. It's as simple as that. You're just going to be one of many copycats, basically.
So again, you've got to be a step ahead of the pack. And this is precisely why I've always made it a huge priority of mine to constantly learn and innovate. And any time I do that, it gives me an edge for a certain period of time and I’m more successful. Then others start talking about it and they catch up. I realized a long time ago I won't ever be able to prevent that from happening. So instead of trying to, I'm better off just continuing to improve and innovate all the time, and to never stop. You can never stop if you want to stay in front and win.
Now with that out of the way, you should have the context in place to understand what I'm about to share with you. In this video, I want to share with you one specific strategy I use to gain a competitive advantage selling physical products on Amazon. And this a major one, possibly the biggest one of all. And it is product strategy. Let me explain what I mean.
The problem with private labeling, well, is that everyone sells the same products. That's sort of the concept of it, right? Essentially people are copy-pasting products onto Amazon from suppliers that offer the product. And as you know, there's dozens, sometimes hundreds of suppliers that offer the exact same product. So of course, when we have dozens, if not hundreds of people buying this product and selling it, even if they're putting their own name or brand on the product, it's still essentially the same exact thing. And now this obviously does create saturation. For sure it does.
But the problem is that most sellers do not understand or know how to overcome this, so they just keep on doing it. And most sellers believe the solution is something like using a tool such as Jungle Scout to find a hot and untapped opportunity. And while I certainly agree it's very important to find a great product opportunity, this is not the solution because what happens is that what's now "unsaturated" will become saturated very soon, especially if it's popping up inside a popular product research tool like Jungle Scout, that means thousands of other sellers just like you are also going to see it.
Now some other sellers believe the solution is to do more marketing or find a new hack, give away more products, get more reviews, learn the best product launch strategy, and so forth. But these things are not the solution either. You're still going to be fighting in a very saturated marketplace with no actual advantage. It essentially means that the seller with the deepest pockets wins or that no one really wins or makes a lot of money.
So, what is the solution? How can you win? Well, the solution is simply to make the competition irrelevant. The truth is that 99% of sellers are, again, competing head on with near identical products, benefits, angles, target buyers, and so forth. And I refer to this all combined as product strategy. Well, the truth is you're always going to be fighting a bloody battle if you do that. Again, no marketing gimmick or hack of any kind can get you out of that hard bloody battle for long.
The only way to escape the competition, or I should say get ahead of the competition, is to be different. And of course, I don't mean be different just for the sake of being different. I mean, be different in a way that's better. You've got to have a product that stands out and is different. You've got to give people a genuine reason to buy from you instead of somebody else.
And I know what you're thinking, you're thinking how can I do that? Now that's a great question because nobody really knows how to do this, and it took me a long time to figure this one out and I've spent 7 years on this and countless hours studying the world's best brands and learning from some of the smartest entrepreneurs on the planet. What’s really good news for you is that this is much easier to do than you think. And for us private labelers, this is becoming easier by the day as technology evolves and there are more options to get things done in general.
There are ton of things you can do with little added costs or effort on your part to stand out. The key to becoming different is inside your mind. The problem I've found is that it's hard to think of anything without the right mental framework, so you've got to learn the right questions and how to look at things to be able to perceive the opportunities and see things others don't see.
Now let me give you some examples. Most people look at what others are doing and aim to do more of the same but just a bit better. And this works to a certain extent, but eventually it becomes hard to gain any advantage this way when everyone else is also doing it. So instead, you want to look at what others are not doing. You want to ask yourself questions like what are the biases with this product. And the cool thing is that the more competitive something is, the more heavily biased it tends to be towards sellers competing on the same exact factors, like really hard. When you can come up with something different, you can stand out like a polar bear in an empty desert.
What is everyone focused on and what would the opposite look like? Think about that. That's powerful to consider. A very simple thing I like to look at is what is the emotional bias with this product? Is everyone focused on the facts and details of the product itself, which by the way is very common when it comes to physical products. The focus tends to be about who has the best features and product details. Or is everyone focused on the emotional benefits of the product because some people don't really care about the details as much as they care simply about the emotional benefits. Usually it's one way or another and everyone is heavily biased towards one side of it. If you do the polar opposite, that alone can give you differentiation and a genuine competitive advantage.
You see, it can be very simple things like that, that make a huge difference if you just know how to look at things and what questions to ask yourself. But again, the problem is that most sellers try to be different with like better images and copy, for example. But this is not true differentiation. This is just marketing. The same goes for adding in an ebook as a bonus that no one really cares about or needs. This again is not real strategic differentiation.
But having a unique type of packaging, for example, that is a very simple type of actual differentiation if it's actually making your products better or different in a value added way. But ultimately, what's really important to understand, because there are so many different things you can do to differentiate, is that you're not looking to just add features and more stuff. It's not just about adding things. That is not a good strategy. Instead, what you want to do is figure out exactly what people care about the most and amplify that. Give them more of that. Make it better with some sort of differentiation.
And then eliminate or minimize the rest, so you don't put effort, time and money into it. The ultimate strategic advantage is when you have a product that's more appealing than alternatives and it’s also simpler or less expensive for you to provide it. Then you're both adding more value and a cheaper cost into the equation. And when you do that, it's hard not to beat the competition. By the way, in the next video I'll be releasing ... I'm actually going to share with you how you can be more efficient and procure your products at a lower cost than the competition, so keep an eye out for that.
Another thing that's great to look at is what are people currently liking or disliking about the product? Good news is that for products on Amazon, this is so easy to do because if you analyze the reviews you'll see what the most common complaints and praises are. The crazy thing is that despite buyers complaining about a certain element of a product over and over again, most sellers will still just copy-paste the same exact product once again into the marketplace and face the same exact complaints. There's no added value or improvement when you do that.
You should always analyze this before launching a new product because this is one of your best opportunities to differentiate and actually be better. In fact, to help you with this, I'm going to give you a templated spreadsheet for the framework that I use to analyze how products can be improved by looking at reviews. You can download this for free via a link that's below this video, and I hope you apply it, because it can open your eyes to a game-changing move for your products. And by the way, you can also apply this to existing products and it will give you a good idea of how it can be improved and what you can do to gain a competitive advantage.
And then actually we're going to talk about the best way to evolve a product over time here in just a couple of minutes. But before I do that, I want to actually show you how this framework that I'm sharing with you works in action. So let's jump on over to my computer screen and I'll walk you through it, so you can go ahead and apply it right away.
