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    Interview

    Interview: Driving Profitability on Amazon

    There is a dirty word in Amazon ecommerce that we have to discuss: profitability. Or, in many cases, the lack thereof. Driving profits on the world’s biggest online retailer is not an easy mission. That’s why we invited Martin Heubel, former FMCG category manager at Amazon, and now leading his own Amazon consultancy Consulterce, to join us on the podcast to discuss his detailed framework to maximize profits while growing your business with Amazon. 

    Notes:
    How to Design a Profitable Amazon Vendor Portfolio Strategy

    Transcript:
    Peter Crosby:
    Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age.

    Peter Crosby:
    Hi everyone, Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. There is a dirty word in Amazon ecommerce that we have to discuss: profitability. Or, in many cases, the lack thereof. Driving profits on the world’s biggest online retailer is not an easy mission. That’s why we invited Martin Heubel, former FMCG category manager at Amazon, and now leading his own Amazon consultancy Consulterce, to join us on the podcast to discuss his detailed framework to maximize profits while growing your business with Amazon. Lauren Livak and I grilled him on this most important topic.

    Martin Heubel:
    Yeah, thanks for having me Peter, and very much looking forward to this podcast episode.

    Peter Crosby:
    So when you spent five years at Amazon, specifically as a senior category manager in FMCG, and now you put that deep knowledge to work to help the very people you would beat up on in every annual business review. So how did that transition happen for you, and why the focus specifically on profitability?

    Martin Heubel:
    Yeah, sure, absolutely. I mean, as you already hinted on, I started at Amazon back in 2016 in the German business of theirs taking responsibility as a Vendor Manager for their home housewares category, so taking care of a lot of brands that were dealing with a lot of heavy and bulky products. Before then in 2018, moved into the more fast moving consumer goods side of the business in the UK and took care, and responsibility of the confectionary side, confectionary and coffee product categories, and also had additional responsibilities for certain profitability initiatives at Amazon.

    Martin Heubel:
    And over the years negotiating, but also partnering with brands, there obviously are recurring patterns that you see when you work with these leaders that also try to crack the Amazon puzzle as I like to call it, because, of course, I mean, they try to get to a profitability or profitable state within Amazon, and oftentimes they're just getting confronted with certain demands or certain asks that a Vendor Manager has to put on the table.

    Martin Heubel:
    But I've seen especially over the time around COVID over the last two years that a lot of C-level executives are looking more and more closely into the Amazon P&L, always asking the question, "Okay, when do we actually reach the scale in order to become profitable with Amazon?" And to me, and we will probably go into detail in the next couple of minutes around that, that's one of the biggest misconceptions you can have about Amazon. It really starts within your own organization, and after five years of conducting banner negotiations myself, the question for me became, "Okay, do I do that now for a sixth year or am I actually moving roles, switching into the industry to actually help brands to make more sense of this Amazon puzzle altogether?"

    Lauren Livak:
    And Martin profitability is hard. I think we can all acknowledge that. We've had multiple conversations about it. It's not an easy fix and especially in e-commerce because it's a new industry and everyone's trying to figure it out. Why do you think it's so hard for brands on Amazon? And I know you have a specific framework that you were just talking about, those trends that you've seen.

    Martin Heubel:
    Yeah. Lauren, I'm glad you bring that up because, I mean growth to a certain extent means nothing if it's not profitable in the long run as well, if it's not sustainable. So I think it's very crucial for any brand selling currently or is going to sell on Amazon in the future to really ask themselves the question, "Okay, how do you reach this profitability?" And yes, scale can be one part of it. But I think to your question, why it is so hard, it's really because there's a lot of misconceptions out there about the way that Amazon operates.

    Martin Heubel:
    To just name a few, I think the biggest challenge in the place for brands is that they still treat Amazon like any other retailer and not like a marketplace. But if you think about it, they are not actively developing the category for you as a brand. They basically do not invest heavy resources into working and partnering with brands to actually develop your business. That's why they outsource a lot of the stuff to the Amazon Advertising teams.

    Martin Heubel:
    They are also following different rules when it comes to investments, when it comes to retail marketing spend, when it comes to auto coop, which is not necessarily returning the same growth that you would see with other retailers as well. Plus, and this is the second challenge that a lot of brands, well, why a lot of brands are having challenges with Amazon is that they're also a price follower. So it requires brands to review how they do their business, not only with Amazon, but also across the board with their other retailers and retail channels.

    Martin Heubel:
    And I think this is so key to understand, first the thing that Amazon is not a retailer, but a marketplace, but also that they will always orient their pricing based on what's out there in the market and take a look through the customer's lens, that a lot of brands that typically come from a more traditional retail background struggle a lot of adapting their business model towards this new and emerging trend that Amazon has set in the e-commerce industry. Whereas more digitally native brands typically can accommodate this setup a little bit more easily, because they are not necessarily having all of that legacy where they have built and developed their business towards different directions, and now they have to adapt to the one challenger brand or challenger retailer, Amazon, who tries to do it a little bit differently.

    Peter Crosby:
    So Martin, these retailer realities of Amazon, or maybe the non-retailer realities of Amazon, led you to develop this framework that takes those realities into account and comes up with a way of thinking about it. Could you walk us through that?

    Martin Heubel:
    Yeah, sure. As I said earlier, one of the biggest misconceptions that brands have is that reaching scale is the only way to become profitable with Amazon. And it really couldn't be further from the truth, because change towards profitability on Amazon really begins within your own organization. And it really starts with the notion of deciding on whether you are defining a dedicated assortment strategy, so you should list all your selection on Amazon as opposed to selecting the types of products that you're actually selling through the marketplace.

    Martin Heubel:
    And to also understand how the margin performance be before even listing the product. You have a lot of data that you can leverage in terms of that, but I don't see most brands doing that. So it really starts with defining your Amazon portfolio first, and then also driving really an active product mix management, meaning that you are targeting your marketing and your ad spend towards products that ideally are creative in terms of a profitability standpoint, and that you also streamline your activities around promotions and marketing spends to drive in a creative account margin, not only for Amazon, but of course also for your own business.

    Martin Heubel:
    And that really then integrates into the third pillar of managing your cross channel promotions, because it's, I've just seen it all too often that a lot of the offline teams, offline retail teams in a business aren't aware of the damage they can really create if they're handing over heavy bulk discounts to wholesalers or distributors who are conveniently also third party sellers on the marketplace. So they're really feeding their own competition on Amazon itself, which then really hits back to all of the teams that are working actively on the Amazon account itself from a vendor standpoint.

    Peter Crosby:
    That framework makes a ton of sense and all three of them, I think, we should try and see if we can dig into in a 35 minute podcast. So let's jump right into it. Managing your portfolio more selectively, it feels like many times brands know they are behind on the digital shelf and really want to just thrust all of their items online at once, but it's sounding like that may not be the best strategy.

    Martin Heubel:
    You understand why brands want to do that, right?

    Peter Crosby:
    Yeah.

    Martin Heubel:
    Also because, if you look at anything that has to do with Amazon, it starts with a typical Amazon flywheel. Many of your listeners will have seen it where it basically states that product selection paired with a good customer experience, leads to growth, leads to economies of scale and thereby to a lower cost structure for Amazon. So of course, if that is the business model of this online retailer, selection is one of the key components in order to get this flywheel spinning. So your Vendor Manager and Amazon itself has a very high intrinsic motivation to get you as a brand to list all of your selection. And it will make sense from, if you think about it, in the first couple of minutes, because the more selection you offer, the faster you can grow, the more eyeballs you get on your product ranges and on your brand.

    Martin Heubel:
    But again, if you think about the mechanics, the underlying mechanics of how Amazon operates, they're being a price follower, they're orienting their pricing based on all of the retailers that they see selling the same product in the market, you quickly run into issues because it will erode your margins. So following this Amazon narrative of listing all of your selection without thinking twice about it, will bring you into a situation where you grow in the first couple of years very rapidly, and where then, successively, Amazon will come and say, "Look, you've grown so much over the past years, now, we would like to also have a better compensation, higher trade terms in exchange for that."

    Martin Heubel:
    And it is very hard to reset your business at this point in your business because you're already so dependent on the growth that whenever you take out selection or products out of Amazon, it obviously makes it harder for you to grow year over year. And most of your listeners will be incented to grow the Amazon channel. And while I'm not saying that you should now go and say, "Okay, we are delisting 50% of our products that we are selling to Amazon right now."

    Martin Heubel:
    I think forward looking, a lot of brands will have to come up with strategies to decide, does it really make sense to list every single product that is in your NPD pipeline? Or should we become a little bit more sensitive and drive a selective assortment approach where we list the products that we know are not necessarily sold at any discounters that will make our life harder from the end customer price point of view? And where we also know that we can guarantee the stability in terms of profitability, in terms of customer attention, and also in terms of drawing new customers into the category yourself.

    Martin Heubel:
    And it really is important that brands are not only narrowing down basically the products that they list to Amazon, but that they're really following a data driven approach when doing so, so that they can anticipate the three functions each products would have in your portfolio, either a product attracts new customers into your category or to your brand, either it is a growth driver or either it is a profitability driver.

    Martin Heubel:
    And I think you need to find the right mix and you also need to become aware of what the function of each product is to then decide, okay, if you're onboard it, does it level our growth? Does it level our profitability or does it also attract more and more customers towards our portfolio that we list on Amazon? And for brands that really want to go the extra mile, they then can contemplate developing and also launching exclusive Amazon ranges in order to completely disconnect themselves from the aggressive price algorithm that Amazon is following altogether.

    Lauren Livak:
    And Martin, I think this is incredibly critical, especially for brands who might just be starting or might just be creating their strategy, because they can set it this way right now and then move forward. But even for brands who have experienced what you shared, where there's a large growth in the first couple of years, and now they're trying to figure it out, the challenge is that it gets connected to the growth goals of the company. So you grew 30% the first year and you're like, "Okay, I'm going to grow exponentially more and that strategy needs to be fundamentally connected to the overall goals of the company." So I've seen that a lot in conversations that I've had.

    Martin Heubel:
    Yeah, absolutely. And this is why I'm always saying, "Growth is easy to achieve, but sustainable growth is really the trick that you need to go after." And I get it. It's great to report to your manager that you've grown 30, 40, 50, 60 or 100% in the first couple of years, but it will haunt you in the long run. So especially brands that are early in the vendor life cycle with Amazon, they really need to obsess about exactly this point, because it starts all, really with what selection do you onboard to Amazon? Is it a good fit for e-commerce in the first place? Or do you basically just feed the beast that then is haunting you because your Vendor Manager and also the Amazon algorithm from a profitability standpoint comes back to you and requires more margin, more funds, more investments, and you can preempt that, to a certain extent at least, by really obsessing about the right portfolio strategy, which most brands do for any other channel, for any other retailer already. But somehow they've forgotten to really adopt the same principle in their e-commerce operation as well.

    Peter Crosby:
    So Martin, I'd like to sort of get inside the room for a minute, if you don't mind. When you work with a client, and let's go from the mindset, or the perspective of a brand that's been on Amazon, maybe has been living off the feeding the beast for a while, and now they're trying to figure their path to a healthier profitability approach. What are those conversations like? Are there disagreements? Because I'm imagining you're challenging a lot of people on what they base their job success on and yet now it's not. So I would love to know sort of. I would imagine part of consulting in this case is also a certain amount of therapy. And I'm wondering sort of what that conversation is like in the room and sort of how somebody that might think about engaging in this topic can sort of guide people through that journey?

    Martin Heubel:
    Yeah, absolutely. Of course, I mean, it's not that you come in and you say, "Look, you need to do anything different or everything is different." That's not what this is about. But I think a lot of my clients, they face the challenge that their margins have eroded over the years. They are still growing fantastically with Amazon, but the annual vendor negotiations or the joint business plans for their Amazon Vendor Manager become tougher and tougher by the year. So there's only so much of an investment that you can give if every year you put one and a half, 2%, 3% on top of that.

    Martin Heubel:
    So you quickly reach a point of investment ceiling from which you need to disconnect yourself at a certain point. And while that is a very tough discussion to have with your Vendor Manager and often entails punitive measures, to even halting the orders towards Amazon for a certain amount of time and or period of time in order to reset and reduce your trading terms, a lot of brands are not yet at this investment ceiling.

    Martin Heubel:
    And this is where it becomes really important to wake up and have a discussion around, okay, if we were to invest, like we invested into Amazon for the last five years further, it will quickly become unsustainable, maybe in 2022, maybe in 2024, but you will see that the investment ceiling is there. And then you quickly open up a discussion towards, okay, what other levers do you have? Because nobody wants to go down the route of punitive measures. It's a lengthy process. It hurts. You have to report a lot.

    Martin Heubel:
    So a lot of executives are obviously looking for solutions and addressing the portfolio, but also how you drive the right margin mix with the levers that you get from Amazon directly, such as Amazon Advertising or price promotions is something that needs to be evaluated in detail. It's not only about the margin of Amazon, you also need to balance the profit margins that you have on the brand side. And at the end of the day, ideally it is profitable for both parties so that everyone, Amazon, but also yourself, you are basically pulling on one rope and you want to go into the same direction as well.

    Martin Heubel:
    The biggest challenge that brands will face that have already reached their investment ceiling is that there is a certain sense of panic. They want to change it quickly. They blame Amazon's algorithm, and this is where obviously a consulting engagement first starts with look, Amazon hasn't necessarily changed the pricing algorithm since the inception back in the '90s. They have also not necessarily followed a different selection strategy from their end since then.

    Martin Heubel:
    So it really comes down to finding then levers to say, okay, what is the root that is the least painful that can help you to still grow, but amend either your portfolio or also your investment strategy into price promotions, or into a targeted spend, as compared to solely saying, "Look, we'll have to disinvest from Amazon altogether." And part of that discussion is, of course, to have with the Amazon teams, but also, especially with those teams that have nothing to do with the Amazon account whatsoever. Because again, if they're working with another retailer, another wholesaler and they're handing out huge bulk discounts, you will see that reflected on Amazon eventually. Amazon at the end of the day, and this is very crucial to understand is basically the mirror of your distribution strategy.

    Lauren Livak:
    And I think this leads really well into the other piece of your framework about incentives. So you talked about, it's not just the Amazon team, it needs to involve cross-functional people in the business. And personally, I can relate to this because I fully believe in the saying, "What gets measured gets managed," because it does, because we're humans and that's how we focus our goals and our strategies. And how are you able to get all of the teams on the same page, especially when you're thinking about growth numbers for different retailers and figuring out the right metrics?

    Martin Heubel:
    Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a cross hierarchical and cross-functional effort. So I think that is the biggest challenge that typically a lot of internal stakeholders have also on the client side to really get across. And it really starts top down, that you need to educate really the most senior decision makers in your organization that e-commerce is not operating in a vacuum. And especially if you work with Amazon who pursues strategy, but also pursues the logic that customers are not always educated enough to inform and to price compare products before the purchase, that you really need to consider that in almost everything that you're doing.

    Martin Heubel:
    And that it will also be reflected in the way you have to design incentives with any of your retailers going forward that may impact your growing Amazon business. So I think as with most things when it comes to e-commerce, but business in general, you need to adopt a quantitative and data driven approach, taking a look at how much weight the Amazon business has in your current endeavors is crucial. And then also to anticipate how much of that share is actually going to grow.

    Martin Heubel:
    So how big will Amazon be in five or 10 years, presuming that you can actually accelerate the business even further and how much of a profitability challenge will that become, if you compare also the mix effect that that brings, if you look across all of your accounts. If Amazon is neutrally or even accretive to your profit margin, then great. But often brands will find that Amazon is very unprofitable as an account, but grows the fastest across most accounts that they have.

    Martin Heubel:
    And if you position it like that towards senior stakeholders in an organization, you will quickly realize that they will develop an intrinsic motivation themselves to address the Amazon accounts because they know that otherwise they will have to invest more and more in order to even out this unprofitable account growth compared to their other retailers, and then to address that will be much more costly in five years as compared to right now.

    Martin Heubel:
    So that's certainly the first thing that I would recommend any of your listeners to do to really look into the status quo. Where does Amazon stand in terms of a margin position compared to your other retail channels and then also to project that for the next three, five and 10 years, based on the internal data that you probably also get from your financial stakeholders. So you quickly see, yeah, it's not a retail or sole retail endeavor, you need to bring onboard ideally your finance department and then also the right decision makers that are not only position makers in the e-commerce space, but rather holistic decision makers in the organization.

    Lauren Livak:
    And do you have an example? We talk about incentives a lot. Could you provide an example of what that looks like cross-functionally?

    Martin Heubel:
    Cross-functionally in terms of incentives, you mean with-

    Lauren Livak:
    Yes.

    Martin Heubel:
    ... wholesalers or?

    Lauren Livak:
    With wholesalers internally with internal teams. Because I feel like it's two pieces, there's an internal incentive to get all of the teams aligned and then there's externally with the retailers you need to provide those incentives as well.

    Martin Heubel:
    Yeah, absolutely. I think internally it is a little bit easier because you can follow simply a data driven approach and you can also highlight, okay, why is it benefiting the organization to make one or two changes in the way you incentivize retailers that may bite into your margins? Externally speaking, it's tricky, because none of your wholesalers, distributors or other retailers will want to give up your margin.

    Martin Heubel:
    So it really comes down to developing yourself a plan. And I gave you a concrete example when it comes to promotions, a lot of brands are following a high low strategy or an everyday low price strategy, but whenever they conduct a price promotion, they typically do it in a rotating phase. So they have a price promotion with retailer A in week one and then with retailer B in week two, and then with Amazon for example.

    Martin Heubel:
    Meanwhile, Amazon doesn't integrate into this high low strategy. They will always match the price or the discounted price of retailer A and retailer B throughout the entire time. So highlighting that internally is, again, relatively easy, externally, you will need to develop more streamlined approaches to probably harmonize the times when you actually are funding price promotions, which will also get you a grip on when Amazon is matching these price promotions. Pricing is always at the product of the retailer, for sure. But we know that they historically are following.

    Martin Heubel:
    So developing a more streamlined marketing and promotions plan can help you to also offset the negative impact that you have from a front margin perspective at Amazon without jeopardizing too much the type of incentives that you hand out to these retailers, but you will need to obviously educate them towards redistributing them across the year. And again, it also comes down to the differentiation of your portfolio.

    Martin Heubel:
    It will make sense to also position that certain retailers may have exclusive parts of the portfolio that are not necessarily available to Amazon and vice versa. And the more you do that, and the longer you do that, the more you will see the margin benefit unfolding across your, yeah entire accounts that you manage. And there will also be, yeah, long term, but also medium term profitability mix between those accounts will unfold typically a little bit more favorably as compared to just listing the same selection across all of your retailers.

    Peter Crosby:
    It's such a complex web of decisions and processes. And when you think about a brand starting to take this approach, this sort of the annual business review with Amazon, but is that something that you'd want to start well in... Would you want to start to make these changes well in advance of that business review so that sort of by the time you get there, some of that fruit is starting to grow on the tree or what's the right order of work here?

    Martin Heubel:
    Well, it really depends on the individual business situation. Whereas your margin right now, are you heavily under pressure and do you need to see results very quickly or are you in the luxurious position that, yes, you see that your margins are trending towards the wrong direction and you want to preemptively do something about it? I think in the latter point, if that's the case, you are in a position where you should probably still start as early as possible. It can be throughout the year, it can be after your yeah, annual business review.

    Martin Heubel:
    But ideally you want to do it in the sweet spot of once you have concluded your annual vendor negotiations with Amazon to really come up with a strategy that is based on the learnings of your negotiations with Amazon right now, and to see, okay, how has Amazon positioned itself from a margin point of view, where are the challenges in your business? And then to draw the conclusions from that on whether you need to focus and go all in on developing exclusive ranges, either for Amazon or other retailers to differentiate yourself enough, or whether you have to say, "Look, the margin is so horrendous with Amazon.

    Martin Heubel:
    We actually need to be a little bit more aggressive and we need to even conclude or take into consideration to delist heavily unprofitable and selection of ourself. And this is where I see a lot of brands are shying away from because Amazon always is very quick at delisting products, when you think about it. They have something that they call CRaP.

    Peter Crosby:
    Mm-hmm (affirmative).

    Martin Heubel:
    Cannot realize any profit and the algorithms they're throwing out these products faster than you can take a look at it. Whereas brands really struggle with delisting heavily unprofitable selection for themselves. So they drag on year after year. And the longer you drag on with this, the higher is the chance that later it will bite you back because it is so hard to give up this revenue. So for brands that really have a lot of margin pressure, I would always encourage them to act rather quick, but sensibly. So to really look at their current portfolio and which products are really hurting them in terms of profit margin, and where's also not necessarily the distribution towards their top line sales.

    Martin Heubel:
    And if you find that sweet spot you can already preempt a lot of the issues that are currently unfolding in your P&L while then also in a second step address yeah, the wider margin challenges that you have, for example, by not listing products where you know that they will unfold unprofitably because you're selling them also to discounters or by developing or launching already your exclusive Amazon range that you may have in yeah, the backdoor.

    Peter Crosby:
    So I know that individual results may vary, but as you are preparing an organization that you're consulting with to make some of these tough choices, how is it that you paint the picture of what they might look like a year from now, or what inspires them to sort of take these more aggressive steps that are very uncomfortable and maybe pull revenue away for a bit, sort of, how do you sort of describe that?

    Martin Heubel:
    Yeah. You really look at their P&L and you really understand how Amazon develops its business with them compared to other retailers. And what you will quickly see is a lot of frustration on account management, in the account management teams, when it comes to their endeavors with Vendor Managers who basically follow an entirely transactional approach. And also Amazon leaving them more and more in the dark about process developments and also the tools and how to use them.

    Martin Heubel:
    This is why a lot of brands have to rely on agencies in order to manage the catalog for them in order to drive the digital shelf. I mean, you are aware of that more than anyone else. For me, when I come into a consulting engagement, it is very important to first take a snapshot of the status quo. So how does the Amazon account look like right now and how does it benchmark against the average in any given category? So how much are you investing into Amazon as compared to A, your competition, but also the unrelated peers and other categories that there are in order to understand how profitable you are for Amazon?

    Martin Heubel:
    And then the second step, you also need to do that internally. So how much are you currently investing into Amazon as opposed to your other retailers? And you need to understand also from a financial point of view with your CFO ideally, how happy are they with the Amazon account right now? How happy are they with the overall profitability across your accounts? And based off that, you can draw a conclusion on whether you should take baby steps into the right direction, or whether it requires a little bit more of a disruptive approach to really tackle the Amazon front across various bits and pieces.

    Martin Heubel:
    This can entail being a little bit more firm in your approach on how to negotiate with them in your annual vendor negotiations, but then also everything that you do in the background, we talked about it, defining a differentiated Amazon portfolio, managing your product mix differently so that Amazon doesn't dictate the products that you put for example on promotion, but that you are city seating in the driver's seat and then that you also integrate that into your wider cross channel promotion alignment that you're driving.

    Martin Heubel:
    And the severance of these activities really depend very much on the snapshot of the status quo. And if you really want to do it sophisticatedly, then it would also look forward into the next three to five years of a projection on, okay, if we don't do anything today, what is the cost of doing that? And typically that flips the switch as well by getting especially senior stakeholders on board that are not necessarily aware of all of the applications of their in actions today.

    Peter Crosby:
    I know it's easy for a podcast host to sit here and go, "Well, this makes perfect sense to me," but as I look out at the world and the situation that we're continuing supply chain disruptions, uncertain pandemic, certainly we're seeing conflicts that we never thought we would see, inflation resulting from all that, there's so much uncertainty. And we're also seeing e-commerce return to a more expectable path of growth as opposed to the surges of the pandemic.

    Peter Crosby:
    Do you feel like the willingness to sort of make these changes might be more heightened in a time like this, where you want to insulate yourself a bit from some of these things by managing this business more effectively? Are you finding that, that's increasing the desire to do something like this or is it sort of making people even more wary of change?

    Martin Heubel:
    I think it's a mix of everything, right?

    Peter Crosby:
    Yeah.

    Martin Heubel:
    Because I think the COVID era and now also the current ongoing situation in the world has really shown us is that most of the activities that we thought are very sturdy are very fragile and well, there are different angles from which you can approach this, but I think what it shows, I mean, business hates uncertainty. Whether you're in retail or whether you are anywhere else, everyone will confirm that.

    Martin Heubel:
    So I think it's very important over days, and you see that happening already in a lot of yeah, sea level discussions as well, the diversification is becoming more and more important. Of course, you should not solely sell on Amazon. You should diversify your business across retail channels. But I think the sophistication of managing each individual channel is increasing and we have seen that over the past two years already, because yeah, managers are all of a sudden all over, how can we actually grow Amazon? How can we do more of it? How can we do the right things?

    Martin Heubel:
    Whereas most of the east brands were selling to Amazon before, but the emphasis wasn't that much on it. So I would say yeah, we will see in the foreseeable future a continued shift towards this approach of drawing awareness to the holistic management of yeah, a retail operation and that includes supply chain, that includes cost management, that also includes how to really grow each and every channel. But at the end of the day, every business needs to create value for the customers it serves. And you need to be there where your customers are, whether this is via a marketplace approach, a D-to-C approach, an offline approach, or a mix of those, is completely up to you. But I think if anything, the past two years have shown us that diversification really helps to tackle most of these challenges that we are facing right now.

    Peter Crosby:
    Well, Martin, thank you so much for bringing that brain and that experience onto the podcast and walking us through your point of view and experience with this. I'll just remind everyone that we will share the link to the full portfolio strategy information on your site in the show notes. But just to read it out, consulterce C-O-N-S-U-L-T-E-R-C-E.com/amazon-portfolio-strategy. I'm sure Martin, I know you're also on LinkedIn. If people wanted to get in touch with you, could they send you a message on LinkedIn?

    Martin Heubel:
    Absolutely. LinkedIn or my website are typically the best places to reach me.

    Peter Crosby:
    Terrific. Martin, thank you again so much for joining us. We're really grateful.

    Martin Heubel:
    It's been a pleasure joining you today. Thanks for having me and yeah, enjoy the rest of your week everyone.

    Lauren Livak:
    Thanks Martin.

    Peter Crosby:
    Thanks to Martin for sharing his profitability framework with us. Please share this episode with your Amazon-focused colleagues, they will thank you. And thank you for being part of our community.