One of the first brand names to pop up on Amazon search results related to sports’ gear - FUJI Sports has gained quite a name for itself in the sports gear and wear sector owing to its high-quality brand of products that are built to last and have proven to withstand the athletic battlefield.
FUJI Sports was stuck with a major brand name issue wherein their brand name was showing up as FUJIFILM on Amazon live pages and not as FUJI Sports / FUJI as it should be. This brand misnomer was a cause for great concern as it was affecting close to 4,000 FUJI Sports product ASINs and naturally, this inconsistency in their brand name had to have an impact on sales.
FUJI Sports had explored all possible options to get this problem resolved - including escalating the issue to the founder of Amazon himself - but to no avail.
The team at SalesDuo reached out to Amazon and raised a case to change the brand name to FUJI Sports along with supporting evidence like Trademark documents. Even though Amazon rectified this from their end, the brand name would always revert to “FUJIFILM”. It would, at times, reflect “FUJI Sports” for an hour or so but would always go back to “FUJIFILM” soon after.
What follows is a story of success brought about by merging SalesDuo’s domain expertise and good old teamwork!
The problem was simple but getting to the root cause was proving to be an issue. As is said, understanding the problem is half the solution. As exemplified by this adage, the first step to solving this problem was to figure out what was causing it in the first place.
The realization dawned on a fellow team member at SalesDuo that this brand name issue could be attributed to Amazon’s Brand Normalization.
Amazon came up with Brand Normalization as a tool in order to standardize all brand names. For instance, take the case of FUJI Sports itself. Some of its products carried the brand name “FUJI”, some carried “Fuji” and some others carried “Fuji Sports”.
With brand normalization, ideally, all the products in FUJI Sports’ catalogue would start to reflect “FUJI Sports” as the brand name.
This would ensure uniformity and would also make the process of creating product families and variations much easier.
But in FUJI Sports’ case - owing to the similarity in the two brand names - “Fuji” got normalized to “FUJIFILM”.
How the team went about solving the brand name issue is a classic instance of the wonders that can be achieved when domain expertise + teamwork are put together!
Once the internal team at SalesDuo put their heads together and managed to figure out the root cause of the problem, the task at hand was simple enough - to unmerge “FUJI Sports” and “FUJIFILM”. But the process for getting this done was not as simple as it sounds.
As an external party, SalesDuo did not have access to Amazon’s Brand Normalization tool BONSAI which could have been used to unmerge the two brand names. As only the Internal Team at Amazon has access to unmerge brands, it was decided to reach out to FUJIFILM under the assumption that as a large brand, they might have Vendor Manager support from Amazon.
This assumption turned out to be accurate and was a huge step taken in the right direction!
First, SalesDuo identified all the FUJI Sports’ products that were affected by the brand normalization error. As the next step, the team reached out to the National Account Manager at FUJIFILM and explained the predicament. We explained to him ideally what is causing this issue - which was Normalization in BONSAI - and asked him to share the details with their Vendor Manager about the normalization error and asked them to fix it. After providing him with the list of impacted products with their ASIN, the remaining task was just unmerging the two brand names so that FUJI Sports could get back to its original names.
Owing to the National Account Manager’s readiness to help, we were able to get to the solution with much ease.
Finally, the issue that had been plaguing FUJI Sports for more than 6 months was taken care of in under 2 months by SalesDuo. The result was 4,000 FUJI Sports product ASINs free of the incorrect brand name. Following this, FUJI Sports became an independent identity.
The Brand Name Fix not only ensured the fixing of the incorrect brand name but also made the process of fixing the pre-existing variation issues that existed in FUJI Sports’ catalog much more streamlined.
No more confusion for their customers and no more negative impact on sales!