The Long Tail of the First Aid Category on Amazon

GOJO and Vi-Jon are the two most interesting brands in Amazon’s first aid category. Vi-Jon because it’s the top performer and GOJO because it’s knocking on the door of the High IQ quadrant. From there we see a fairly steep drop-off in marketing performance (share of voice) and supply chain effectiveness (revenue leakage). However, Clorox, Edgewell and Acme United are holding their own. This category has quite a “long-tail” with over 10 brands holding 1% to 5% share of voice.

This BrandIQ Quadrant benchmarks brand performance by the critical disciplines of supply chain operations and marketing. Who is best able to both drive and fulfill demand on Amazon in this category? The metric that underpins marketing is Share of Voice (how often your brand appears in organic or paid search results), and for operations it’s revenue leakage (how well are you able to avoid losing sales because shoppers are unable to buy your product because it’s unavailable, lost buy box to 3Ps, etc.). Given Amazon’s ever-increasing complexity and speed, mastering both is not simple.

High IQ Brands

Vi-Jon’s (along with its Swan brand) is quite a force in the first aid category with 13% share of voice. Vi-Jon is the top advertiser, losing out only to GOJO on organic search. It’s Vi-Jon’s impressive 4% revenue leakage metric that’s enabling it to hold on to sole ownership of the High IQ Brand quadrant. If Vi-Jon continues to press on the advertising accelerator, and continues to fulfill that demand with excellence, you can expect its position in the quadrant to stay strong.

Large Leakers

GOJO appears to be a master marketer whose weakness is it’s inability to deliver on all the demand it’s generating. With 15% share of voice, comprised of equal parts organic and paid search, it has a balanced marketing attack. It’s also effectively competing with 3Ps, losing less than 3% of revenue here. However, GOJO has an 11% hole in its product availability bucket. They’ll have to drive that metric down below 10% in order to unseat Vi-Jon. Certainly not an unattainable goal.

Niche Performers

Clorox, Edgewell and Acme United are all performing admirably in the first aid category. And it’s really a story of single digits. They all have 2% to 5% share of voice. On the supply chain side they have 2% to 4% revenue leakage due to availability issues. And 2% to 7% revenue leakage due to loss of the buy box to 3Ps. These three brands are making all the right moves, it’s just that they’re just stuck down in the long-tail of the category. That may just be the nature of the first aid category, which has a much more even distribution of share of voice relative to almost every other Amazon category we’ve analyzed.

Laggards

RB is not far from the Niche Performers category. It’s losing very little revenue to 3Ps (2%) but is struggling a bit with availability and is losing 12% of revenue here. And it’s 5% share of voice puts it right in the mix for this particular category. A few tweaks on the supply chain side and RB will see a nice shift to the right.

Johnson & Johnson is right there with RB on share of voice. But it’s revenue loss to 3Ps and availability issues are both in double digits. Keep focused on that supply chain.

Resmed’s CareTouch product line is pegged in the lower left corner of the quadrant. That typically means they only have a few ASINs in the category, which turns out to be the case for CareTouch as fewer than 10 ASINs came up for the keywords we analyzed. When that happens, you usually need to lift the hood on the data and analyze each ASIN individually. So, we won’t pass judgement on Resmed.

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Methodology

Our data was drawn from an automated, daily analysis of top keywords in the Amazon first aid category over a one-year period. Our method focused on 1P brands and their associated SKUs. Marketing performance was determined by analyzing Share of Voice which essentially divides how many times a brand appears in search results, by the total available slots in the search results. Our system looked at both organic and paid ads for the top keywords discovered for the first aid category on Amazon. Our system focused on page 1 search results and the product page for each SKU. Each appearance of the brand in organic search and paid ad slots was given equal weighting. Revenue Leakage was determined by an algorithm that analyzes inventory availability of the SKUs on the product page and translates that into estimated revenue missed for each brand due to things like a SKU being Currently Unavailable, Inventory Encumbrance, Item Under Review, a 3P seller taking the buy box, etc.