Mastering the Art of Licensing

Paul Sonneveld
Hi everyone, I am your host, Paul Sonneveld. Now, before we dive into it today, I just wanted to remind you, a quick reminder about Accelerate. I'll be at Amazon Accelerate next week, and MerchantSpring is a proud sponsor. If you are heading there too, please drop by our booth. We'll be at booth 29. I'd love to meet you in person, talk about the latest features we're building, and of course, even chat about how you could maybe be a guest on Marketplace Masters or what topics you'd like to see. It's always great to connect with listeners face-to-face, so please do stop by. 

Now, today's episode is titled Mastering the Art of Licensing. And that is a topic powerful and, you know, very often misunderstood. So I'm really excited to today be joined by two wonderful guests from Lunge Marketing. First, Trisha Hubbard, the founder of Lunge Marketing Group, whose team manages over 40 Warner Bros. brands and brand stores on Amazon. And alongside her, Josh Fulmer, executive director and point of contact for Warner Bros. at Lunge, bringing immense knowledge and hands-on experience in licensing. 

So together, Trisha and Josh will help us walk step by step on how to set up and optimise your presence on Amazon whether you're both the brand owner or the seller of licensed products. We'll cover everything from advertising to product page optimisation, to store linking strategies, et cetera. Stick around to the end. We'll also be taking your live questions. So as per usual, please pop them in the LinkedIn comments section or on YouTube. All right. Welcome, Trisha and Josh. It is absolutely great to have you here.

Trisha Hubbard
Thanks for having us. Nice to be here, Paul.

Joshua Fulmer
Yeah, thank you so much. 

Paul Sonneveld
All right, well, let's sort of set the scene a little bit. Big picture, right? So maybe we'll start with you, Trisha. Why is licensing such a powerful growth lever on Amazon?

Trisha Hubbard
I think, well, I know that the growth has coincided with the authority of brand registry over the years. So, five, six years ago, brand registry wasn't managed very well at Amazon and they realised, I believe it was during COVID, is all of the counterfeits and fraudulent products that were on Amazon that were saying, for example, this is a Disney Mickey Mouse hat, and they really weren't authorised to sell it. Brand Registry came into play, and they really became more and more of the authority and the gatekeeper on Amazon, which cleaned out a lot of counterfeit and fraudulent products, allowing the actual brand owner and the authorised licensee of that brand owner to become the officially licensed product. So consumers know pretty much, maybe 80, 90% of the time now, which before it was a lot less than that, that they are getting a truly authentic licensed good. It could be anywhere from a Cuisinart spatula to a Disney hat. You will get the authentic product now. And that, like I said, it coincides with brand registry becoming more and more powerful.

Paul Sonneveld
It sounds like Amazon has made some fantastic improvements in that space, really to benefit both parties there. So maybe for you, Josh, from a licensed owner's perspective, keep in mind, some of these licensed owners, from what I understood and talked to earlier, they may not even be selling any product themselves, and oftentimes they don't, right? What are the first steps you'd recommend in really going about that brand registry and setting up a brand store on Amazon?

Joshua Fulmer
Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I think your first step, you really have to dive into is figuring out your workflow, right? So you can have this beautiful brand, something that's well known across the way, but if you don't have all your buy lines linking to your store, you don't really have a shopping experience for people. So, figuring out your workflow and who owns what position within that, if everyone is driving to your brand store specifically, and if they are having checkpoints where they know that, hey, if we're doing a launch for this product line, they need to filter those ASINs to that licensee owner so they can bring those ASINs into the brand store. 

It's a super important process to have, so people don't get left out of that. And the importance of Amazon as a whole, those brand stores are really front and centre because no one can compete with the advertising there. There's no competing pop-up ads or anything. It's just your product and your brand. So it's really locking down that process and making sure everyone adheres to it.

Paul Sonneveld
I just had a sort of supplementary question there. I imagine there are scenarios where the brand owner may be a little bit late to the Amazon game, and there is a whole range of sellers and distributors already kind of selling a licensed product. So there's an aspect of trying to take back some control of the brand, all that. How does that play out in terms of brand owners sort of entering onto Amazon and the brand stores and tying it back together?

Joshua Fulmer
Trish, you want to answer that? 

Trisha Hubbard
Sure. A great tool that Amazon introduced a couple of years ago is the transparency program. And harnessing all of the, to your point, harnessing all the sellers that are selling your product. Now the brand owner has decided, I want to be the authority. I want to be the point of sale for all of our products. You're having to go in and basically clean house, and have to knock them off Amazon. Also, require some of your authorised sellers to enter into the transparency program, which is a really good stopgap, to prevent any of the unauthorised third-party sellers coming onto your detail page or as an option to buy.

Paul Sonneveld
Great. Absolutely. So let's put ourselves in the shoes of the licensee. There's obviously in my mind, I'm trying to be like there's these two parties, right? And the brand is what unites them. Josh, how do you go about linking, or maybe let's start with this one. What are the most common mistakes? You guys are in this day in, day out. I think it's not just one, but you're managing more than 40 brands on behalf of Warner Bros. So you're dealing with content all the time. What are the most common mistakes that you see licensees make when listing licensed products?

Joshua Fulmer
I think in my mind, a lot of it- 

Paul Sonneveld
Maybe just the top three. I can see your mind going.

{All laughs}

Trisha Hubbard
Yeah. 

Joshua Fulmer
It's the full approach, right? When you're looking at a licensee within a licensor property, you have to look at the whole approach, right? So, something we'll see a lot outside of our catalogue and what we manage is people will just put out designs or content that might not adhere to a brand style guide within a licensor, right? So if we're working with a franchise or a brand or a product that has got this big notoriety as being an IP and has these really well-established style guides, and you have a licensee putting out designs that don't adhere to that in any way, you've now broken the trust of the consumer, and you're also breaking your trust with the licensor you're working with. So a really important thing, especially on my side of the table within the creatives, is making sure that you look at that style guides, the omni-channel strategy, and making sure that you aren't just putting out something that's specific to that ASIN, but actually lives within the entire ecosystem of that product.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. And if I'm a licensee, sorry, you want to add something to that? Yeah, go for it.

Trisha Hubbard
And this isn't necessarily tied to licensing, but one of the most common mistakes we see some of brands in general when they come to work with us is they may not have even, I mean, this isn't a licensing thing, but they haven't even run their product through trademark. So they are not trademarked with that brand. And you can't really go to step two if you don't have that done. You can't go to the brand registry. You can't get listed properly. 

So I was going to say that was going to be a common thing we see as an agency. But most obviously in the licensing space, those brands are obviously already trademarked, but it's also about as a licensee to what Josh was saying, adhering to the brand guidelines, but also connecting with that brand owner so that you can be part of their overarching brand store and cross-promote within their brand store. It just brings a lot more traffic to your products if you're in their store as opposed to your own store under maybe your manufacturing name or your company, so.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, I mean, presumably, there are some royalty payments for the use of the brand that goes back to the brand owner. So you do want to, as the licensee, you want to get some benefits from that. I guess the practical question is, in case anyone's wondering into the audience, like if I'm a licensee and I'm selling, I don't know, already selling products of brand X, right, with a license on it. How do I make sure that they properly link to the brand store? And is there a way I could even influence the merchandising of my product in the brand store? I mean, how does that work in, I guess, in reality, I appreciate Lunge Marketing, and we'll sit in the middle of that conversation many times. I'd love to just understand how that could or should work.

Joshua Fulmer
Yeah, so I think that's a super valid question. And Trisha, if you've got more to add on to this, please do. But I think this actually really relates to a comment I saw in our chat from Christian, saying that, you know, that support tickets can just follow a script and they don't read what you write. Well, that's actually really funny in my mind, because if there's a byline linkage area, we use a pretty strict script to solve that problem. So that being said, when these products do go out, Amazon has some AI platforms that they use to see where it should live on the byline, where it should be driving. 

So you still have to scrape your ASINs, right? As the licensee, you still have to make sure your ASINs are linked into that brand store. If they are not, there's a pretty simple process you can do within the Amazon support system, you go to the help bar, and you go to the byline being broken. And if that doesn't work, there's a pretty, pretty decent script we built out to say, hey, this is broken, and this is why. And as for like merchandising on the store itself, I think that's a really valuable conversation to have is when you are working with a brand owner and a licensee, a licensor licensee, to have the conversation of, hey, we want this merchandised. We've spent X amount of dollar marketing for it, and we think it's really going to kind of succeed. We'd like a little more front and centre on the store. 

So partnering with your licensor and licensee to figure out where those merchandising live, and how they are highlighted within a brand store, can be really healthy in any business relationship, coming with a solution as opposed to a problem and saying, Hey, I see a product that's currently unavailable on your brand store. My product just launched. We just dropped X amount of money marketing for it. And it's very popular. It's gone viral on TikTok. We'd love if we could take that currently unavailable spot. You've brought them a solution to something you already see fixed. So I think having that relationship can be really healthy.

Trisha Hubbard
I agree. You touched on most everything I was going to say.

Paul Sonneveld
That's great. And I just want to, Christian, thank you for, I think we already answered your question, actually, here. So thank you, Josh.

Trisha Hubbard
Oh, the violations? Yeah. I would say a benefit to having a close relationship with a brand owner as well is they can go after some of these violators on your behalf. If you're not making any way through Amazon. So, you know, it's kind of going back to Amazon, does prioritises vendors in the licensing space over sellers as far as the amount of the level of service that you're going to get and having the network of the context. 

So we work really closely with all the major studios, but also the people at Amazon who are responsible for the different licensors at Amazon. So we've had situations where if we haven't made any headway of getting rid of an unauthorised seller, we go to the brand owner and we enlist the help of our vendor manager or one of the leads, studio leads at Amazon, because it can really be debilitating to a business if you can't get them off. I mean, it's not very often, but we have had to go down that path, and it works.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, great. Thanks for diving into that, Trisha. And Christian, thanks for your question. I encourage everyone to keep sending your questions our way through the LinkedIn comments section. We've got from Sal as well. And I see Christian just added another one. We'll get to that a little bit later. We'll have a dedicated section in about 15 minutes from now or 10 minutes from now, where we'll go through some of these questions too. But keep them coming, guys. That way we add some real value to our audience here. So thank you so much. 

Okay, back to our conversation. We've spoken about the licensee and the licensor, obviously working together through the brand store and all of that, but that's just one aspect, right? I'm thinking there are broader promotions, there's advertising strategies, there is even just seasonal campaigns when it comes to licensing. This coordination between the licensor and licensee to really maximise the execution of a brand, the strategy, and obviously the sales behind that. It seems like if it works well, it can be really powerful. 

I've seen this myself when I was in physical retail, but it does require a lot of coordination. I can already see a lot of things just not working the way they should. What works or what would you recommend when it comes to coordinating this and orchestrating this whole piece, particularly when there's multiple licensees involved here? You're nodding your head, Josh, so maybe I'll throw it to you first.

Joshua Fulmer
So that's a, we had a really good example lately. I'm not sure what details I can share, but a major movie launch happened with a partner we work with, and it was a very large activation, right? There's a whole bunch of licensees working under this IP to do a very, very large launch. And I think,  step one, again, as any launch, anything you want to have good planning, a good roadmap and good runway to get there. And having plans in place when there are hiccups, having that the solutions available and good communication to activate execution of problems. 

So, I think that the biggest way to kind of coordinate is figuring out what your end state goal is. And making sure that everything's built out for that, right? If it's advertising properties, if it's sponsored brand video, if it's A plus content and PDP, and giving everyone deadlines that are meetable, that give you enough bandwidth to say, hey, if deadlines are failed, we still have a week built out where we can build things in that might have been missed. and really just ensuring that there is a full omni-channel launch. And kind of where I'm looking forward with this, right, is it's not just Amazon. 

When you're launching all your Amazon ads, if you're doing a large provisional launch, you can't just do it on Amazon. You have to touch across your omni-channel platforms. If it's TikTok, if it's Meta, if it's Google, if it's print media, if it's email campaigns. And you have to do that in a way that really drives towards your traffic on your Amazon brand store or on your products if you're really facilitating that revenue build.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. And I guess I just want to hone in a little bit more on the advertising side on Amazon specifically. I appreciate it. I mean, these are big brands and I think obviously we're very Amazon-centric, but these brands are so big for them. Amazon is just one of the activation channels, right? Probably amongst a range of whole others. But in terms of Amazon, can you talk a little bit more about, how does the coordination around the advertising spend. Who's running the advertising budgets? Who's driving traffic to the brand store? Is this all funded by the brand owner or is there a complementary strategy there? What have you seen that works or maybe you'd recommend?

Joshua Fulmer
Trisha, please correct me if I'm wrong in any of this, but from what I've seen, generally speaking, if it's driving to the brand store, it'll be funded by the brand owner. If it is driving to an individual product, it's very likely the licensee will be supporting that. And so when you're looking at your full Amazon strategy, it's figuring out and making sure those two things complement each other. So, the licensee isn't putting out something very different graphically or call-out-wise that's driving to the product as opposed to another ad that same consumer and that same kind of funnel might see to go to the brand store. 

So when you're looking at your full channel approach there, you want to make sure that you have good sponsored brand ads, good sponsored product, good sponsored brand video, even touching on some of Amazon's fringe cases like TikTok and OTT. So I think it's just important to recognise again, I know I'm saying full channel strategy a lot, but it's so important in big activations and big licensee launches to really adhere to that. So the short answer would be if it's to a brand store, likely paid by the licensor. If it's to a product, likely paid by the licensee.

Trisha Hubbard
And yes, on that note, to what Josh said and you mentioned, Paul, it is a collaboration. And when you are launching a new licensee with an established brand, we always have a meeting with that brand owner on behalf of the licensee or bring the licensee in to talk about rules of engagement with advertising. So nobody's crossing over. But yes, it's. Every brand that we work with, the brand owner is supporting the brand store traffic. our clients are supporting their off the brands.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Great. Which gets us to, so we're talking about obviously activations from a brand point of view. How do I measure success on Amazon or, you know, let me make it a little bit more specifically. That's a big question. But you know, what metrics or reporting you think is most important for owners of a brand to really track the health of their licensing program. How do they know, actually, we're doing a good job on Amazon in terms of managing our brand, working with the licensees. How do you report back on that? What metrics do you look at?

Trisha Hubbard
It looks like my screen froze, but can you hear me okay?

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, we can hear you.

Trisha Hubbard
What our clients really look at is shift units to the customer because that is where they determine is this brand successful or is this license successful or not. And then we typically recommend, you know, you've got to give it at least six months to start seeing some traction. Again, that's another area that we have to bring a reality check to our clients, because if, especially if they're new to Amazon and they launched their license and, you know, after a month, they don't understand why am I not getting this million-dollar PO? And we're like, well, you have Amazon is slow and steady. And I will say, though, with a known license, you can have that trajectory happen faster. But they're all looking at what is shipping to the customer as far as the metric for a successful license, and if they should continue, renew it, drop it.

Paul Sonneveld
Yep. Makes sense. Anything you want to add to that? Josh?

Joshua Fulmer
I think it's a lot of that gets in depth for your KPI tracking and what's important to you as a business. But there is strategies to employ of, hey, if the brand store is raising conversion rates and all of a sudden that product is merchandised on the brand store, and that product's click-through rate increases and increases, that can show a really good success improvement from a brand owner helping a licensee. And then alternatively, if a new product launches and all of a sudden there's a whole bunch of traffic driven to the brand store surging around that, maybe that licensee is really supportive of the licensor. So I think it's figuring out those metrics and the checkpoints in your agreement and your collaboration.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, thank you. Looks like we have lost Trisha's camera, but I think you can still hear us, Trisha. Is that just checking there?

Trisha Hubbard
Yeah.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, cool. So we've talked about things working together quite well, but what if, I mean, maybe let's be a little cheeky here. What if the licensee misbehaves? I'm thinking like map violations in the context of brand licensing, non-compliant creatives, or even third case is really like, you know, unauthorised sellers trying to piggyback off all the hard work that people have done. How do you handle those scenarios? I've outlined probably three specific ones there, three different ones, but I'd love to get your perspectives on, how do you work with it? Particularly where they're like, they're legitimate licensees. So you can't just ask Amazon to remove them from the platform or from your listing. You have to work with them. But how do you get them back? You know, back in line.

Joshua Fulmer
Back on track. That's a great question. I think I imagine Trisha's working on rejoining right now. So 

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, I think she's just trying to reboot it. 

Joshua Fulmer
I know that in the creative sense, we've reached out to brand directly and said, you know, a licensee and said, hey, you know, we're really excited you're on this brand store for this launch, but we need to bring front and centre that you're not adhering to the overall style guide, and we can't and good conscious show you showcase you on our brand store, right? We can't drive that traffic and we. You know, you can give them metrics and saying, we're seeing this amount of success on this brand store and it's really beneficial to be here. 

But really what it comes down to is facilitating good conversation between these licensors and licensees and making sure they understand the importance of adhering to these things, right? And a lot of times that can leave heavily on lean heavily on the licensor and saying, hey, this is someone that's paying to use your product and they are doing it right. And so leaning into that and saying, having them step in sometimes and facilitating that conversation can be a big stakeholder, but really a lot of that type of world within this is communications and setting expectations.

Paul Sonneveld
Yep. Interesting. Yeah. I don't, I think Trish should be, I could see her mic, uh, there. Okay. So, 

Trisha Hubbard
I’m back.

Paul Sonneveld
Oh, here we go. Welcome back Trish. So, as we we're sort of at the 26-minute mark, so it's sort of what it what We sort of get to the point the end of the conversation and maybe open up for some further questions. So maybe really practical question, right? Some I mean you guys been doing this for a long time and and I'm sure a lot of the brands you work within the and the licensees, it's it's you know, well established but there might be a licensee listening to us and you know, they've got limited resources. You know, they're selling a product with a license on it. Maybe they're not even thinking about this properly. I mean, what would you recommend to them? Are there maybe one or two impactful things they can start with, maybe over the next few weeks, just to start that journey around executing on Amazon in a more cohesive, integrated way with the brand owner?

Trisha Hubbard
If they already have a licensing agreement or they're an authorised licensee?

Paul Sonneveld
Probably the former. Yeah, let's assume the former.

Trisha Hubbard
So they have a relationship with the licensor, and they want to get started on Amazon?

Paul Sonneveld
No, I guess what I'm saying is, I imagine there's a lot of licensees that have the license, their brand's on Amazon, but they're just not doing any of that coordination that we're talking about, right? That sort of execution, activation, all of that. What would you put on that to-do list, guys, like next week or the week after, just do these two things to get things started?

Trisha Hubbard
Whoever they worked with on their licensing agreement, they should reach out to that person and find out who is the team that's managing their Amazon brand store. Because again, it's only going to be a brand store situation that the brand owner is, well, most likely, because they're not manufacturing. A lot of times, they're not manufacturing their own goods. Or in some cases, they are, and they're licensing their product out. That's a whole another story about having a FAMA agreement. I would go to the license owner, ask them who the Amazon team is internally, connect with them, and then make sure you are adhering to brand guidelines and that you can get connected to the store, because that's really going to be an important lever for you to have that connection.

Paul Sonneveld
Great. Thank you. All right. Let's, we've got a few more questions from our audience, so let's throw those up and see if we can help them work through some of their questions here. So let me go back to Sal. So Sal raised this question about 10 minutes ago. What about brands that want to get into licensing? How should it be approached? What qualifications or data would a licensor find valuable to permit a brand to license their IP?

Trisha Hubbard
So one of the documents that a lot of the brands want a licensee to have is based on their manufacturing facility. So it's called a FAMA. And it is, that brand has authorised you to manufacture at this factory and that you're adhering to their best practices and standards of representing that brand, putting it on the product that you have an agreement for. So having a FAMA in place is big. Okay. What was the rest of the question?

Paul Sonneveld
Bring it up again.

Trisha Hubbard
Yeah, that's OK. I saw this one earlier. Yeah. So that's what I would say is a Fama. And then, you know, you need to obviously have a connection with the brand owner and you need to make sure a lot of times they limit who can manufacture what category, so there's not a lot of crossover. So that's something you need to find out before you invest and then approach them with, hey, I want to put, you know, I don't know, Spider-Man on this hat. Well, we already have agreements in place with X, Y, and Z manufacturers to do that. So those are things you need to be aware of is the manufacturing facility has to be approved. And then you also need to make sure you've got the right products that they may be missing some holes in their categories that they're offering.

Paul Sonneveld
Thank you. There's another one from Christian here, which seems to be increasingly common. How do you address patent or trademark pending? So with cuts to budget at US government agencies, such as USPTO, we may not have a trademark number yet, but the ticketing system requires a number, not a pending state.

Trisha Hubbard
So you usually, what we've seen in these situations is the a patent attorney that you're working with can escalate this typically with USPTO. And you can have in a pending status, you can have that in brand registry. It just has to be at a certain step along the way. And a lot of times your attorney can help with that.

Paul Sonneveld
Great advice. Last one from Colleen, can you provide a roadmap, one page or white sheet solutions page, including a step-by-step process for brand owners, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe the broader question here is, what is a good place to educate yourself on how this works and get started on this, particularly if you're kind of new to this space, either from a brand owner point of view or maybe from a service provider point of view.

Trisha Hubbard
There's a lot of scenarios in that question. 

{all laughs}

Trisha Hubbard
It would have to be, like, from what perspective are you wanting to get on Amazon as the brand owner and control your brand and your brand store and harness all these sellers? I mean, I don't know where they are in their journey. So what do you think, Josh? It is kind of a.

Joshua Fulmer
I think the, It is just figuring out what your end state goal is and where you really want to go to and reverse engineering from there, right? And I think that's a conversation we could have with someone, but it's not as easy as it sounds sometimes.

Paul Sonneveld
All right, I'm going to throw one last question in here from David. He asks, as a licensee, when launching products on Amazon that we own and manufacture, should we use the licensor's brand name or our brand name as the licensee?

Trisha Hubbard
Use the licensor brand name. Always. We've tested both. And without a doubt, the conversion is much higher when you are just the brand. Even though you're the manufacturer, they're not going to know the manufacturer's name. They're going to be, consumers are going to be looking for that brand. They're going to be searching for it. They're not going to be searching for your company name.

Joshua Fulmer
Yeah, I think that's super valid, Trisha. And just like people are looking for that IP, right? As much as your manufacturing might be awesome, you might have really awesome stuff. They're looking for that IP specifically. So, 

Paul Sonneveld
Yep.

Trisha Hubbard
And consequently, like this, if they are the manufacturer and they have other products that aren't branded, but they want to promote that under their actual company branding, because a lot of times if your company brand name is trademarked, you can add that as a brand and market other products that aren't licensed under that brand. It's another way to add sales and growth to your catalogue.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, that's a great little hack. Great little hack. Excellent. Okay, fantastic. We are well past 30 minutes, so I do have to draw us to a close. First of all, I want to thank all of those that have asked us questions. So, Sal, Christian, David, Colleen, thank you so much for participating today. That's been wonderful. Appreciate your contributions. And of course, a huge thanks to Trisha and Josh for sharing their expertise and practical insights. It was a real masterclass in licensing on Amazon. It's certainly one of the most complicated topics or most difficult topics that I've come across today. And I think I'm sort of close to 150 episodes or so. So really, I appreciate you bringing your deep expertise to this conversation. 

Of course, for those of you who weren't able to watch the full recording, I hope you've enjoyed or weren't able to attend live, I hope you enjoyed this recording as well. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to Marketplace Masters, of course, and visit our website to see what other live conversations we've got coming up. Josh and Trish, thank you so much. I think all three of us will be at Accelerate next week. So I look forward to seeing you there. Thanks so much.

Joshua Fulmer
Thank you.

Trisha Hubbard
Thank you. I appreciate it.

Paul Sonneveld
All right, everyone. Yeah, if you are going to be at Accelerate next week, that is the third week of September. Please come and see me, as I mentioned earlier. I'd love to meet you in person, hear about your Amazon journey, and maybe even chat about being featured on the podcast. I'm Paul Sonneveld. Thanks so much for listening, and as always, wishing you great success and happy selling. Take care.