Amazon, True Stories

Context

• Identified a worrying pattern: post-campaign brand favorability was trending negative in France, Italy, and Spain, directly eroding the ROI of Amazon's TV investment in those markets.
• Root cause hypothesis: the global creative strategy was UK-centric, with Southern Europe receiving a localised translation rather than a market-specific story. These markets were also at a much earlier stage of e-commerce maturity than the UK or Germany.

My role and scope

• Pitched the research project internally, secured budget, and led design, fieldwork brief, and synthesis end-to-end.
• Translated the insights into a regional creative strategy and briefed the agency on a new campaign platform.
• Coordinated creative, production, and media to land the new approach in three markets in parallel.

Goal

• Reverse the negative brand favorability trend in France, Italy, and Spain.
• Move from a UK-led creative model to one designed around how Southern European customers actually shop.
• Build a research-backed playbook that could be reused for future Amazon market entries.

Strategy

• Run quantitative research plus qualitative focus groups across FR, IT, and ES to map the actual perception gaps versus more mature markets.
• Use the findings to design a region-specific creative platform anchored in real customer experience, not aspirational brand claims.
• Make brand visibility, product breadth, and trust signals the three creative pillars, directly addressing the lower brand awareness, narrower category perception, and lower trust the research surfaced.

Execution

• Increased explicit Amazon brand visibility in ads to address the awareness gap surfaced in research.
• Showcased a deliberately wide range of everyday products to recode Amazon as a destination for common purchases, not a niche e-commerce site.
• Featured authentic customer reviews prominently in the creative to build trust and credibility, a direct response to lower brand-trust scores in the focus groups.
• Localised the narratives per market (Italian, Spanish, French) rather than running one regional cut.

Results

• Significant brand penetration improvement in France, Italy, and Spain.
• Reversed the negative post-campaign favorability trend that triggered the project.
• The research model and creative framework were replicated in 2021 to guide brand positioning and TV creative for Amazon's expansion into Turkey, Poland, the Netherlands, and Sweden.