One Brand Leads the Pack in Amazon’s Dog Toy Category

There’s only room for one top dog in the Amazon dog toy category. After that, it’s a dogpile in the Niche Performers and Laggards quadrants. Spending is sparse on paid ads, with only three brands putting any bite behind their bark. Supply Chain execution is the usual distribution among brands ranging from excellent to…for the dogs.

The 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? The metric that underpins marketing is Share of Voice (how often your brand appears in organic and 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

Central Garden & Pet is one of the top performing Amazon brands we’ve analyzed recently. While their share of voice is not quite as dominate as other High IQ Brands in other categories, given the dog toy category is made up of so many niche competitors, it’s impressive they’ve been able to separate themselves. There is quite a gap between Central and their next-closest competitors. Central has more than double the share of voice for organic search, though things are a bit more compressed for paid share of voice.

Niche Performers

Competition in the Niche Performers quadrant is intense. This is one of the most concentrated quadrants we’ve seen recently, consisting of six brands. While most of the brands are pegged near the bottom given their low share of voice, we see Benebone, Outward Hound and GoDog (Worldwise) rising. Benebone thanks its advertising efforts, while Outward Hound and GoDog are holding their placement based on organic search rankings. Multipet is the one brand who is not on solid ground due to revenue lost to 3Ps as well as revenue lost due to availability issues.

Laggards

It’s not unusual to have this many brands in the Laggards quadrant, but this is certainly a full (dog)house. The problem here of course is low share of voice combined with revenue leakage due to loss of revenue to 3Ps and availability issues. There’s rarely a silver lining for brands in this quadrant. And the only way out is to tack to the right by fixing your supply chain issues. Amazon will never move you “up” until you start moving to the “right”.

Explore Other BrandIQ Quadrants

Methodology

Our data was drawn from an automated, daily analysis of top keywords in the Amazon dog toy 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 dog toy 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.