Tomer is a speaker, an Amazon Seller, the host of the Top Dog community, and the author of "Ride the Amazon Wave." We recently met when we both spoke at SellerCon in Austin.

Tomer has a unique approach to getting 5-star reviews and scaling sales on Amazon. No, this does not include buying reviews, begging for reviews, or doing anything that toes the line of Amazon's TOS. 

He is all about surprise and delight. And I couldn't agree more! I learned things from Tomer about reviews that I haven't heard ANYWHERE else…and I've been doing this for a while. 

Here's a look at what we cover:

• Why the raw number of 5-star reviews for you or your competitors isn't what matters most, and how to shift your focus to the 5-star review RATE instead.
• Why 4-star reviews hurt your listings.
• 5 keys to a 6-star experience on Amazon that you probably have yet to think of.
• Creative ways to delight customers without spending more. 
• Why offending some customers can be a good thing.
• Thinking about every element of your product as an "experience."

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Transcript:

Brett:

Well hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMGCommerce, and today we're talking about building a six star experience on Amazon and we're getting into why reviews matter, but we're going to look at this from an angle that I bet you have not looked at before because it's not just about five star reviews. We've got to do more than that. There's more to it than that. And so we're going to dive in here. My guest today is Tomer Rabinovich. We've met each other at Seller Con this year in Austin, Texas. We were both speaking, I was blown away by his presentation. I said, Tomer, you got to get on the podcast. And he said Yes. And so Tomer, how you doing man? Welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time.

Tomer:

I'm good, Brett. Thank you for me.

Brett:

And I do want to just point out just to underscore what a cool guy you are for me here in the States, but it's pretty late for you. So what time are you recording right now?

Tomer:

I'm in Israel and it's 10:15 PM here, but usually I have more calls after this, so I'm good to go.

Brett:

You're good. So you're ready to rock and roll. I feel the energy, I feel the excitement. So we're at a rock and roll. So Tomer is the founder of Top Dog and he offers consulting. He's got an e-commerce group community, which we'll get into a little bit. And then also a product that's about to launch, which I think everybody will want to learn about as well. And so Tor, if you would kind of give us your background, how did you become a top dog? How did you get into this space? And then we're going to get into our review topic.

Tomer:

Yeah, so you mentioned seller con. So I actually started with those guys back in 2014. I did of course, started selling in 2015 on Amazon. Been doing that for eight years now and been consulting mainly bigger sellers, 70 figure sellers, aggregators, different companies for the past five years probably. I've been speaking at pretty much every major event in the industry, so staying busy. And I also have my own event called TopDog Summit, which is also a big event for a small event for bigger sellers. And also wrote a book called Ride the Amazon Wave, which is right here. So

Brett:

There it is, ride the Amazon Wave. Love the cover design by the way. Love the book and kudos to you, man. That's a huge accomplishment. I know writing a book is building a business all on its own. It's a massive,

Tomer:

Most challenging product I launched so far.

Brett:

So no, it's out and we'll probably direct you, make you the least amount of money indirectly. Very, very powerful. But directly, yeah, we'll not compare to some of your other Amazon products I'm sure, but awesome book, awesome accomplishment. I know everybody knows you. You're speaking at all the Amazon events and so yeah man, really excited to dive into this topic. So talk about five star reviews and how they lead to rankings and why it's not just about the total number of five star reviews you have. Enlighten us please.

Tomer:

Yeah, so if you think about Amazon, Amazon wants to show the products on top that's rewarding on top that are actually selling the most, but that are also doing serving their customers. So that means the customers are actually leaving five star reviews for those products. So it only makes sense that if I'm selling a water bottle and you're selling a water bottle and I get more reviews than you based on every a hundred sales that each of us is making, I will rank higher than you long-term. If you start at the same time, I'll rank higher than you. Now if you already have a thousand new reviews and I have zero, it might be a bit more difficult. But what Amazon is doing is they're rewarding sellers by getting more five star reviews on an ongoing basis. And we've seen this time and time again what we help a seller customize or let's say adjust their customer experience for their product and they just skyrocket in terms of ranking almost overnight when they start accumulating the reviews or if you see that S P V button on Amazon that you can just start using. When we see sales that don't use that and then they start using it, they just take off in terms of ranking as well. They just fail a lot more reviews.

So one of the reasons to keep getting five star reviews is for ranking. And it doesn't matter if you have, maybe you think, oh, I got to a thousand reviews or 10,000 reviews or whatever and I can stop getting reviews, but that's not the case because your ranking will drop. We had a seller that had this gray hat strategy you can call it, where she was sending postcards to her customers from Amazon to get five star reviews from them asking nicely, not incentivizing them in any way, but that's obviously against Amazon terms of service. She got two thousands of reviews decided to stop and her ranking tanked as a result. So I mean

Brett:

Because she was getting a really high percentage of five star reviews by sending in that postcard, once she stopped that maybe the experience just wasn't good enough on its own. So she started getting a lower percentage of people leaving a five star review and that the rankings, so

Tomer:

What everyone can do right now in their niche is they can just go into Amazon and just look at all their competitors on page one, see how many reviews they got in the past 30 days, how many sales they got in the past 30 days, divide one by the other and we call that review percentage. And then you want to see where you stand compared to them. And if you see someone, let's say you're at 4%, they're at 8% and it changes between each product because some products are more, they get just more reviews by nature. Let's say you sell disposable cups, that's not going to get a lot of reviews probably, but if you sell a diaper bag, which is a very personal product, that might get a lot more expensive product to get more, just depends on the product. So if you see that a seller has a very high review rate, you can look at their reviews and see what people are mentioning, obviously buy their product, kind of reverse engineer what they're doing and so on.

Brett:

Yeah, that's so good. And so then what tools are you recommending to see how many sales reviews have come in in the last 30 days?

Tomer:

The easiest tool to use is Helium 10. If you use Helium 10 x-ray, that will just show you the snapshot of the last 30 day sales and then you'll see how many reviews they actually got in the last 30 days. You can just double that to a CSV file, add one more column with a very basic formula to divide one by the other. And that's it.

Brett:

Super simple. And so it's not so much that there's this certain magic percentage of five star reviews to sales, but it's more of a relative scale. So are you getting more five star reviews for every 100 sales as compared to your competitors?

Tomer:

Exactly. And he'll intend, the problem is you only see how many reviews they got. You just see a number. So if they got a hundred reviews in past three days, that doesn't mean much to me because maybe they sold a hundred thousand units. So it just depends.

Brett:

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, very, very cool. And so this is something, let's say that we're new with a product and we're going up against a product that's got a thousand reviews already. If our review rate is way higher than theirs, are you saying we could challenge them rank equal to them in a relatively short period of time? You're talking a few months I guess, and I know everything is different, but

Tomer:

It depends on different factories as well, but definitely you can, if you think about it long term, you can win. You can win over in terms of reviews over them as well, not necessarily if you even sell more units than them for a long period of time. So that's another reason you want to look into this, but sellers tend to think, I just launched my product, how do I get reviews? That's how they think. But to get reviews actually happens long before they launch their products. They need to plan ahead. How am I going to get reviews when they do their power development process and not after the fact that they launched because you can kind of fake reviews or whatever. There are different ways to do that with shady services, black tactics, whatever. But those can only get used so far these days to get a bunch of reviews. But that's not a long-term strategy. So you need to get five star reviews from real customers buying your product of an Amazon.

Brett:

Yeah, it's the only way to make that work because even if you go gray hat, just like you talked about, and even if you don't get caught and Amazon never finds out, once you stop that and your review rate drops, you're in trouble and your rankings will suffer. Let's talk about, and that was a perfect segue by the way that hey, getting reviews starts way before you start trying to get reviews actively. So I know that begins with that experience and you talk about this like a six or you call it a six star experience. What is that and why should we shoot for that?

Tomer:

Yeah, so if you think about reviews for a second, you can only get 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 stars and anything that is not a five star review hurts you. Even a four star review brings you closer to four than 4.5 or five. So we only accept as sellers, we only accept five star reviews for our products. So because of that, if we aim for a five star product, we might land at four or three or two stars, but if I aim for six, I landed at five. So it's kind of aiming for the moon and landing amongst stars. That's kind of what we are trying to do with this six star experience strategy you can call it. But it's really, we call it over deliver and surprise the customers as much more than they expect. And usually when you buy a product, it doesn't matter what it is. If you look at the McDonald's commercial, the burger can look really good when you get it, it's not that good. So advertising usually falls the other way around. But when you think about selling a product and you want to get a five star view for it, you want it to be in a way where you advertise in a way, but when they get the product, they actually get more than they thought they will and that's

Brett:

What we need. Got it. Yeah, I love that. So when they get it, there's some element of surprise of the light, some element of, wow, this is better than I thought. Yeah, because the flip side of that is a big deal. I know we've got a client, and I won't mention the product, but it's a very effective product, but for whatever reason, when you look at the pictures, you think this is kind of a large product, but when you get it, it's kind of small or it's smaller than you would expect. And so people look at that and they got complaints like, Hey, this isn't the size of product that I thought it was. It still works. And so they had to start shifting the photography where they would show the product in someone's hand. So surprises, you know what you're buying right then. And so yeah, totally makes sense. You want to,

Tomer:

Yeah, and because we're doing e-commerce, you don't really know what to expect. You can read reviews, you can kind of see what's going on in my talk. So I kind of mentioned a roller coaster. When you look at a roller coaster, you don't know what they're feeling, right? You can see them screaming, you can see whatever. You can see them coming down the line when you go up, they're roller across the street. You can see them coming down asking them questions, how was it? Whatever people throw up, people enjoy. You don't know what's going to happen when you go up. You don't know what to expect. It's kind of the same way when you buy a product online, you don't know what's going to happen when you actually get it and use it, but if it's more than you thought, that gives you an edge as a seller by that type of experience. And I think we are in 2023 right now. This is the time to really do that. And the bar to entry in customer experience is so low right now because people don't expect it to be better than they thought. They only expect it's going to be worse than they thought. So there is so much opportunity.

Brett:

Yeah, love it. Yeah, it is wide open for someone to do just a good job and then if you do better than that, it's all the better. And I love this approach of aiming for six stars to try to hit five and for the moon. Then among the stars type of thing, have you ever heard Brian Chesky from Airbnb, have you heard him talk about how Airbnb hosts should kind of craft their experiences to wow guests? It's a very similar concept. He uses a different scale. He's like, Hey, what would a 10 star experience be like? And he is like, well, if you knew the person's favorite band and that band was at the house when they showed up and all these outlandish things, and obviously you can't do that, but you start there with your thought process and then back down to, well, what could we do? How could we

Tomer:

Personalize

Brett:

Do that

Tomer:

For 1% of your customers? So one thing with your experience is you don't, not everyone need to have an equal experience. I'm like, let's say we have a crazy idea for an insert. There are insert cards now with videos in them and a whole bunch of stuff. Let's say you do that for 5% of your insert cards, invest two, 3000, really good insert, but only for 5%. If that doesn't work, you need to change strategies completely. If that does work, then you can start dialing it down for cheaper things. But I'm like, let's start with the most expensive thing we can do. Let's go nuts with this. If this doesn't work, we need to change strategies. But if you start small, if you, let's say put an insert that says get 20% off on our store, that's not going to do anything, right? 20% off is a gift. It's a gift to you, not to the customer. So that will probably not work. That is just to have a check mark that you have an insert card and whatever, but that doesn't really do much. And if that doesn't work, it's going to take you a long time to figure that out that you need to change strategies and find something more appealing to the customer.

Brett:

Interesting. So I want to kind of break down the six store experience in just a minute, but now you mentioned in search and you've got my curiosity peaked. So what might you do there? If you do a high cost insert, test it on 5% of orders, what's something wild or crazy you would potentially do there?

Tomer:

So it can be even an instructional video inside of that video. So instead of sending to a lake or a QR code to scan, and you can test that in a different insert and just different things and see what people do they watch more, what do they click on more, what actually works better? And then at the end of the video you can have a magnet to something else to kind of go fill out the form or something like that. So you see how many people actually fill out the form as a result of that compared to sending them directly to the video on your website and see how many people fill the form there and then you can kind of see which works better. Any considerations there to avoid T O ts violations? Yeah, definitely.

We don't want to valids in any way, and the way we do it is do it. We always do a very soft thing and we always think about the customer first. What I mean by that is let's say I want to send it to watch an instructional video. I'm not going to send you to put in your email name an email to watch a video because I can just send you to the video. But if it's a warranty for example, then I can ask for the name an email because I have a justification for that. So it just depends on what it is that I can offer. We don't offer eBooks, we don't offer discounts, we never ask for reviews in our inserts either. You can, by the way, you are allowed to ask for reviews as long as it's unbiased and whatever. But I just think that asking for reviewing your insert is kind of like the waitress coming up to you and saying, how's the foot before you had your first bite?

Right? It's kind of like that. Yeah, so we never do that on what, what a good analogy. Once you have their email, you can always follow up asking for a review, but in our case, that's not even the main way we get reviews. So maybe I'll give you an example of a product and that give you something you can think about. So we were wanted to sell the slack picking set. Basically I said, it teaches you how to lock, how to break into houses. And that set while we were producing it, it became a prohibited product to be sold in Amazon us. Imagine that. So I ended up showing exactly what we wanted to do and the idea was this, everyone was selling these kits. It comes in a small case with all the tools inside and instructions and stuff, and it comes in either a regular brown box or just even a color box of the case.

And what we came up with the idea of making the box black all around and it has a small lock in the front and when you open up, so with black hole around it looks like a deposit box, we made it look like a deposit box and then on the bottom we had made in China and all of the stuff that we need to have on our packaging, but because of the e-commerce, we could do whatever. We can make a very cool looking packaging. So it was black all around small lock in the front. When you open up it from the lock side, you have a small note inside it says congrats, you've just picked your first lock. And that's person they see that puts a smile on their face and a smile goes a long way. Doesn't need to costume more necessarily. We had some funny mentions inside of the flap when they open up the packaging, we had some more stuff offered to remove the object from inside.

So on the bottom of the packaging and we made it very playful and fun and very giftable as well. Not just a product you would necessarily buy for yourself and it's not really a giftable product as a product in its own, but we made it giftable and it has a lot of small surprises throughout the process and imagine one of the pieces is missing when they get the product right, but they see so much different things that add to the experience, so they feel more obligated to reach out to us, say, Hey, this business is missing before leaving a one-star review because they got more value when they got this product.

Brett:

Really, really good example. So I know that was probably touched on a few of these pieces maybe, but how do you create a six star experience? What does this look like? What's the process you go through to say, is this enough to delight customers?

Tomer:

So I am not the most creative person probably I'm very analytic and systemized. So to me, I just think of a product as an experience. So every single touch point they have with the customer is an experience that means when they first look at the packaging, open the packaging, get a product out, learn how to use it, learn where do they store it, what did they do with it, when did they throw it out, if they get a replacement after all of that chain of processes and what I can do in every single touch point and help them out. So it's packaging, it's insert cards, it's instructions, it's even post-purchase things that we do after they purchase, watch a video or sending them email as a result. So we do a lot of different things and as we talk, I know we are talking maybe a few weeks before our Kickstarter launch, but we can talk more about it later maybe, but we're doing very unique things there to get that Kickstarter experience and to get a lot of opt-ins and do also good in the world and not just benefit ourselves with more money and whatever.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. In fact, you mentioned, let's dive into that just really quickly. So talk about the product that you're launching the Kickstarter for and then how are you tying that into Amazon sales and a six star experience? Walk us through that.

Tomer:

So it starts with a product. So the six star experience methodology, the first five stars are all about have a good solid product that is better than everything else on the market. Now with the six stars, the over deliver and surprise and that is when you become, you do something different, hopefully something no one else did before you something out there. The example with the lock picking set because, so the first stars is you need a product that actually works, right? That's the first thing. If the LOF picking set doesn't work, nothing is going to help me out, doesn't have

Brett:

Me on that

Tomer:

First five stars that we need to hit, which are pretty basic. So the product is laptops sleeve, it flips like a regular laptop sleeve, but it's actually also a power bank, a docking station and a laptop mat all in one. So the problem we're trying to solve is I'm as in, you can call it a digital entrepreneur. I have three kids, but I have my own home office where I'm right now and I have coffee shops I go to and I have conferences I travel to and I don't want to take the bag with me or even the charger with me. So we thought what if we develop something that is an all in one thing that solves this problem. So you just take this with you, you have a built-in charger, you have everything built in, you just take the laptop in the sleeve and just work right for the entire day and the battery is strong enough to charge two and a half times.

So we are at the final stages of the PO development. It's been about eight, nine months I think something like that in process. But we documented the entire process of that is probably by the time people watch it, they can find that project shared as well from different steps that we took to develop the entire thing. But at this point, everything I told you is just a product. This is not customer experience, it doesn't really, so then we again think about every single touchpoint. So the packaging that we are doing is very unique. It's an old idea for a book packaging. We are on video as well, so I can explain to you what it looks like, but it looks like this. If you look like this is the packaging, they open it up like this and the book will come out and the sleeve will come out that it's like an old packaging idea for books.

If you let them on the video, it's going to be a bit unclear of what I just said, but it's a really cool and unique packaging. So as soon as they open it, the sleeve pops out of the packaging. So that's the first experience that they have. We're going to have some messages on both sides of the packaging so they can see that as well. And then inside the sleeve we're giving them a key chain and that key chain is a dog key chain. We are called Top Dog my company. So we are giving a dog and we're working with a charity organization in the US so when you buy our product, you actually help save a dog at the same time. And the dog itself has an N F C chip inside. So when you put your phone against it, you're going to see an update on your dog and what's going on with dog, did you get adopted or not and what? What's going on? And later that dog is going to be the one that is posting on social media on our behalf is going to ask you for reviews, it's going to offer you new products we're launching and so on and so on. So we are creating an entire experience

Brett:

From, and now that dog is going to be the liaison between top dog and the customer.

Tomer:

Exactly.

Brett:

Yeah. So fun. So fun. Yeah. I want to talk about product packaging just really quickly because this is such an important topic and this is one of the things that can really change the game in terms of surprising delight. I just remembered the old days when all product packaging sucked and opening a product was a pain and it was not fun. I think Apple was one of the first ones that really focused on man, we want the box and the unboxing experience to be great, to be powerful. One of my best experiences recently, and I posted about this on LinkedIn, so if anybody wants to see a video or kind of see it, go check it out there. But I bought a new coffee maker by cafe. It's a GE company, but it's kind of a high-end coffee maker and the box, instead of opening the top and trying to yank the thing out, one, I had a rope attached to it so you could pull it out of the box that it shipped in.

Then the product packaging itself, the top just opened up almost like what you were talking about where the base is secure, but the top two pieces open up and you just pull the coffee maker right out. I mean it's so great. Usually you open an appliance and you're fighting to get stuff out of the box. This was so easy and it set the stage wonderfully. It was so fun. And now I've told a ton of people about it, it's just, I'm sure it costs more for the box, but what does that gain the company in terms of reviews, recommendations, virality, all that? I've got to think that it's worth it.

Tomer:

So I will say a few things to that. One thing I will say is that Jeff Bezos mentioned that if a customer has a bad experience, they won't tell With social media, they won't tell five people, they'll tell 5,000 people. I believe the same thing happens when you have a good experience, but it just doesn't happen very often that we have a very unique experience. We want to talk and share because how many products did you buy in the past few years and how many products did you talk about on LinkedIn?

Brett:

We have Amazon shipments every day,

Tomer:

Right? So that's my point. To get that five star review from a normal customer on Amazon is difficult to do, right? You need something that will stand out from everything else. So that's why I'm saying it needs to be a different experience. The product has to be better, but you need a different experience when they get it. When it comes to the price, that's a critical factor, but the packaging is pretty much the only thing. We also have a surprise gifting inside that we do sometimes on some products, but customer experience as a whole doesn't need to cost you more money. The example with the lock picking set is just being a bit clever and playful in how we do things, but it doesn't mean hard cost you more. So we use different services for this. You can also use a lot of AI stuff for this right now, but this is I think a bit premature for that, for this level of creative. But what we do is we use NA designs for a lot of different packaging just to see a lot of different ideas from a lot of different designers. And we use a website called Squad Help that helps us to get taglines and slogans and very funny sayings around our brand. So this is a crowdfund kind of like 99 designs, but to get a lot of people suggesting you slogans and tag lines and stuff and then you just pick the winner and then you get paid and then they can trademark whatever they sent you.

Brett:

Yeah, I mean it's so great. So being a play on words or whatever, I remember I interviewed Mickey Agar, she's the founder of Tushy, which is the bidet company. You put it on your toilet or whatever. And then she started a few other companies too, but with the packaging is full of puns, but it came with this little booklet that said this number two shall pass. It was just hilarious. It didn't need to be there, but it was just so funny and ended up at our office and people pass. And so just little funny things.

Tomer:

You don't need to tell jokes, you don't need to be funny, you don't need to be a comedian, you just want to be a bit witty and playful. Put a smile on your face and that adds value. Value is what creates a six experience. And then they will be eager to leave you five star reviews or reach out to you if there's a problem. A lot more than if you don't have something like that.

Brett:

Yes, when you're human and you put a smile on their face, they're more understanding and more likely to go to you instead of going to Amazon to ask for you to fix a problem.

Tomer:

And when we think about the packaging, you mentioned it might cost more, so not necessarily. So we've seen a lot, we helped a lot of cells that have poly bags, but just being a bit more creative and playful with those we have. It just depends on the nature of the product and what it is. The more commoditized your product, the better you want to, the more you want to push towards this. I had during Covid, I wanted to launch a new brand, like a medical brand that is playful and humorous and selling omes and a bunch of other stuff, but we ended up not doing it. It was too saturated obviously during Covid, but for sure

Brett:

Good

Tomer:

News that's really missing in that space. In medical you don't have any of that and I think why not? You can make anything playful and fun and

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. So you mentioned the idea of a free gift and for Top dog for the laptop sleeve slash dog slash charger, you mentioned the dog. It was the dog key chain you said, or dog. So give us some ideas. How should we think about that gift? How much is that often going to cost us? What are you advising people to do in relationship to the free gift?

Tomer:

I will say generally speaking, customer experience. I believe it's something to dedicates 5% of your profit towards this is just take whatever your profit is, I don't care what it is, 5% of it every year say this goes just to improve the customer experience of our customers. And it can be packaging it be a gift inside, it can be letters you send 'em physically, it can be sending them the band that they love studying a few thousand bucks on that. It can be whatever you want it to be, but also understand, again, you don't need to make every customer have the same experience. I have this seller I help to sell off on Shopify as well, and I told them, give me the list of your top 20 sellers, top 20 customers right now that bought multiple times from me to sell this big products for 250 bucks.

And they had these customers buying 10, 20 times from them. And I told 'em, look, call them up. Just hold them up. Just call them up as the owner and just see what they say. And they were just blown away. And then I convinced 'em to send 'em some gifts and some other things because I mean this is something again, no one is doing right, no one is treating their customers more than the customers expect. So it's just something that adds so much. And those people, what do you think happened? It went viral, right? They

Brett:

Buy more, they tell all their friends. Yeah, I mean there's a few brands that I've discovered on Amazon that we buy a lot of those products and I would be pretty blown away if the owner of one of those companies called me to thank me. That's something I would remember. It's something I would share with other people even as a fellow business owner would still be cool. So pick up the phone and we put that aside. We don't think about it because we're like, well that won't scale, but that's the point. It doesn't need to scale. You're doing this for the biggest customers.

Tomer:

One of the person you can watch is Taylor Swift. Taylor is actually doing a lot of things like going to her fans' weddings to sing there all of a sudden out of blue. She does crazy stuff like that because she knows this will go viral. This is what people will talk about. And also even if it's not, let's say you do it and nothing happens, it's still the right thing to do. It's still doing good to your customers. So when I do this stuff, I have zero expectations of them working

Brett:

Nice,

Tomer:

But if it does, that's great, but if I do it a hundred times at some point it's probably going to work. But if I did it a hundred times, I at least gave a lot more value to a hundred customers. So that's kind the effort. Yeah.

Brett:

Yeah. So good. So good. Awesome. Other things we're considering with the customer experience portion. So the product's got to be good. It's got to be at least five star worthy. It works. It is as advertised. The product is good. But anything else you want to talk about on the customer experience part, which is what pushes us to that six star level?

Tomer:

You want to talk

Brett:

A little more about the post-purchase effort too? Just curious what else we're considering there. I think there may be something there

Tomer:

With the dog, it's fairly straightforward on what to do with the dog example, the dog emailing you and messaging you and stuff like that. So that's what we do there. But we have different brands where we do different things. We have a baby brand for example. What we do there is the insert card is written in a kid's font and that's the baby thanking their parents, thank you for buying this product for me. And it's very playful, very cute, and it's like you could buy anything for yourself, but he decided to buy this to me instead. I'll give you one example. When you do these type of things, you might piss some people off. For some reason this starts with dear mom and dad, we had lesbians messages, gay people message us saying this is not right. I'm a single parent, whatever. You might step on some people's toes when you do that type of stuff.

But I think you have to take a risk. You have to choose, this is my target or this is what I want to do, this is what I enjoy, this is what I want my brand to be about with Top Dog. Maybe some people don't like dogs and they get this product and they don't want this key chain, they don't want anything to do with it. They might be pissed and that's okay, I don't really care because this is what we decide. We're going to stand fully behind and this is the brand, these are the values, this is the mission. And I think whatever you decide the brand is going to be about. And with the baby brand, it's more about paying attention to your kids being like a parent without screens and all of that stuff. This is what we decide. And I think you have to connect the mission of the brand, whatever it may be, to an emotion of the customer.

And I think when we in Tab what we tell Tab is going to be about digital entrepreneurship as a e-commerce brand and digital entrepreneurs for them to own a dog is a struggle because they keep moving around, but now they can help save one instead. So that the emotional hook of the brand and that we found this is the integration between dogs and a electronic brand. And you can think there is no connection between the two dogs and that doesn't have any connection. But if you think about Amazon is a company, Amazon, if you go to a page not found on Amazon, you see a dog, right?

Brett:

And those are actual

Tomer:

Dogs of Amazon's employees that they are allowed to bring to their offices and they have over 10,000 dogs. If you go to mid of Amazon page,

Brett:

I've been there, it is crazy. In 2018, we were one of the fastest growing Amazon D S P agencies. So we got invited to the hq, myself and our Amazon director just got to hang out at two different campuses there in Seattle, awesome place. But dude, there are dogs everywhere. I mean the dog park between buildings full of dogs in the build and never seen more dogs. And they were all clean and groomed and it was the wildest thing. It was like I was at a dog show, but cool. But when you think about people love

Tomer:

Dogs, dogs just have an emotional hook to them. They do. Why Amazon is doing this, it's also the right thing to their employees, but that's why Amazon is doing this Now, saying that that might not be for everyone. Maybe you cannot work in Amazon because you don't like dogs and that's fine. But I think as brands, we try to play it safe all the time. We want to have the right packaging, the right thing to say, the right insert. But if you do it, I mentioned in my talk that safe actually equals death if you ask me when it comes to it totally

Brett:

Does. Yeah. Because if we try to not offend anyone, and obviously don't necessarily go out and try to be offensive, that's not the goal either. But think about it. I'm not a dog person, but if I got that packaging and I knew it was saving a dog and you had the dog tag, at a minimum I'd be like, oh, that's cool. And then I'd move on, right? Very small percentage of people that are going to be upset because you do something fun or slightly amusing or you do the right thing and we've just got to put that out of our mind and do what resonates to most of your customers. Do what works for your brand, have fun with it. Do the right and

Tomer:

Don't. And even fault with dear mom and dad, we thought we can change this to dear parent, but it's not the same thing when the kid is writing.

Brett:

Think even in that case, two moms, two dads, most people get that postcard. They're like, oh, this is really cute. It's going to be a very small percentage of people that are like, I'm offended because of the way you structured this postcard. Most people are going to just love it. And so that's what you got to go with.

Tomer:

And brands, midwives are just amazing in how they approach their audiences and how they talk to their audiences and the videos they have and all of that. Just you see a company about something and I just love companies that are playful. But again, emotion can be any emotion. Emotion can be anger, it can be fear, it can be whatever you want it to be. It doesn't have to be funny in top that we're going to have a mix of funny, but it's also very emotional dogs that you help save, right? So it's like a mix of a few things. And I think the more emotions it can create in your customers, the better.

Brett:

Absolutely. And we talk about this a lot. Without emotion, people don't take action unless you're stirring up desire. Either I want to get out of some kind of pain or I want to go towards some kind of pleasure or enjoyment. If you're not stirring up emotion, people won't take action. So the worst thing is not to make people angry with your advertising, but the worst thing is to be ignored or to be just so uninteresting that nobody notices. And so love that approach. Love what you're talking about here, Tomer. And so we will link to the Kickstarter in the show notes and get that out to everybody. So check out the top Dog, laptop sleeve, power Bank, docking station. And I think other things were included with that too, which is pretty awesome.

Tomer:

Hold on.

Brett:

Exactly. But tell us about what else Top Dog does because there's probably some Amazon sellers listening that are like, Hey, I'd like to hang with Tomer and the Gang. So what does that look like?

Tomer:

So we have a few things. One, obviously you can also buy the book available on Amazon, audible, anywhere you buy books from. And the book is the first book as far as I know, that is not about how to sell on Amazon, it's for active e-commerce sellers. So it teaches you how to do product research when you already have some products live, right? And how to build a real company, how to hire people, how to exit if that's what you plan to do. So that's the book. Then we have Top Duck community. So the community is welcoming everyone who is active in this industry. So we have sellers, we have aggregators, we have services, we have agencies, we allow everyone in. It's a paid community, it's own dedicated to app. When you do this video, it's probably doors are open, I assume, but you can check it out if you go to joint top dog.com and check out the community. Then I also work, I have some one-on-one relationship with bigger sellers where I help them grow towards an exit. So that's the only way I do if I help them scale to an exit.

Brett:

And we have our summit as well. But that's pretty much it. It's awesome. We'll link to everything in the show notes. So it's join topdog.com, also tomer rabinovich.com. You find out all the details. We'll link to it in the show notes. Tomer, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much. I had a blast and we'll have to do it again. Thank you so much, Brett. Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? And hey, if we're not connected on the socials, let's fix that problem. LinkedIn is probably the best place to follow me, but I'm also on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter occasionally. And so hit me up. I'm sharing stuff in between episodes and would love to connect with you. And so with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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