I despise their horrible advertising and marketing copy in general and I sometimes just have to tell myself, “it’s just oat milk no need to boycott it because some edgy marketing consultant forces you to read their nonsense”.
Just like random "coca-cola" billboards at the side of a road or a sports stadium
The market for oat milk consumers mostly consists of people that had actively made a choice about drinking oat milk already.
Millennial advertising doesn’t adhere to 20th century advertising norms.
Gen-X is getting older and needs fiber and to lose weight, so they respond to “oats”.
Millennials and Gen-Z want healthy-looking drinks that are trendy and fun, because they’ll never be able to pay off their college loans and grew up during a time where politics were divided and assume we may all die from global warming and WW3 so they just want to be healthy and happy.
This ad is trying to say, “We’re not going to say this is healthy, or will make you feel free, or is a fast meal substitute. It’s just oat milk.”
That pretty much appeals to all of them.
CPA pricing removes the burn
Its similar to SEO. Nobody says "Oh my god, advertising via SEO is free, what a blessing!". It's still a competition. It's still a zero sum game.
Manufacturers are in a fundamental conflict with Amazon precisely because they desire to fully control the retail channels and set their own promotions, online discounts etc. and capture most of the surplus themselves while still segmenting the market and, for example, selling at different prices through certain local distributors.
Amazon has the exact opposite incentives, they want distributors of the same brand to compete amongst themselves so they can offer the lowest global prices, and that it's Amazon and its users that capture most of the surplus.
This is the root of the forgery problem Amazon can't solve, manufacturers aren't willing to vouch for their products when sold in secondary channels they do not fully control. So this means they will not collaborate on the "global rating" scheme either.
Has chosen not to solve. They could trivially improve the situation by ending the practice of commingled inventory so a seller could be held accountable for counterfeit or stolen items but that would cost more so they don’t.
My gut suspects not?
Perhaps in the early and mid 80s you could still buy quality products, but now is seems 99% of things are just mass-produced where ever it is cheapest. People are conditioned on Amazon to find the same product from a jumble-of-letter manufacturer who is selling the exact same thing at the lowest price. I do not trust that if I buy a "known brand" for a product that it is going to be any different from a similar same no-name thing that is 20-30% of the price (...and very possibly built in the same factory). If it's all low quality crap (which a lot of the time it is) then you may as well get the cheapest one
Sadly you need to rely on things like YouTube videos to actually get any kind of idea on if the item is trash or not, and even then there is the risk of paid-reviews so you need to take multiple sources into account, who they are, trust levels etc. it's sad. Either that or - and I know this is madness - go to a physical store and inspect the goods before you buy it.
I would argue that the article is correct that quality is often secondary to speed of delivery and cheapness though. Amazon has totally won there.
- use other information channels like review media (fashion sites)?
- trust secondary sites like brand retailers (IE. John Lewis in the UK?)
????
abstractspoon•8h ago