"Amazon's Choice" certainly suggests editorial oversight, but only in the way that "Quality Inn" suggests quality. For anything that isn't an objective, measurable fact, companies are allowed to lie.
An employee isn't going to give you an objective honest answer or they would tell you walmart has it for cheaper.
Case in point, literally a brick and mortar store with "<store name>'s Choice" as the slogan, to market a brand created by a third party company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam%27s_Choice
-Sam Walton said "We should have a private label soda program. Loblaw in Canada has President's Choice." -Category manager of Soda floats this to potential suppliers. -Cott Beverage says "Hey, we'll do it. How 'bout we call it 'Sam's Choice'?" -Category manager of Soda says "Great! I'll tell Sam." (or more likely, the VP of Grocery/Merchandising) -Sam Walton says "Great Job! Sam's Choice, nice touch. That's my name!"
Amazon’s approach is micro optimized to make money today at the cost of customer satisfaction, a long term losing strategy.
PS: It might just be my circle of friends, but many Amazon early adopters have mostly moved on. That opening the box and wondering how you where screwed this time feeling is a major issue for the company.
In a physical store, I have ignored the end cap because the product was visibly a smaller volume than a competitor at a similar price. I can also go to the aisle section and directly compare all the options the store presents vs products filtered down and advertised to me by Amazon's algorithms. There is bias but more transparency like bottom shelf vs eye level. Amazon is a black hole unless you still trust their review system.
Generally speaking, these copackers do not pay the retailers to get into their store, because the retailer is paying them for these products, and the retailer is possibly sourcing at least the packaging if not the development on their own. Whereas Amazon acts as a platform, retailers actually purchase and take possession of the product that they have had some hand in creating. Essentially, PL (private label) products start much further back in the supply chain. By the time they reach store shelves (even by the time they reach the warehouse), the supplier has already made their profit. You would rarely if ever have a brand in a store that gets upgraded (or downgraded depending on the power of the retailer's brand) to private label due to sales considerations or lobbying on the copacker's part. If anything, the retailer might take on lesser known brands the copacker is trying to promote as part of their sales agreement, even though they could be the same exact product that is in the retailer's branded packaging.
Speaking to Sam's Choice specifically, as it relates to Amazon's Choice: - Sam's Choice is only tied implicitly to its retailer (at least as far as Walmart is concerned, at Sam's Club I'm sure the connection is far clearer). You need knowledge about the organization (or to read the packaging) to understand that this is a private label product. Amazon's Choice is much more explicit. - Amazon's Choice is a designation more than a brand. As far as I know, the products retain their own branding and identity. Most customers understand that private label products are not manufactured by the retailers themselves, but if you want to find out that Sams' Choice (and much of the private label soda and soda adjacent products category in the majority of food retail) is actually manufactured by Cott Beverage, you need to do some research. - The idea that Sam's Choice was "created" by Cott is kind of strange, though I can't dispute it directly. PL brands like Sam's Choice (and Great Value, Walmart's other PL brand) are owned by the retailer and usually entail working across multiple categories, which means working with multiple suppliers. It's possible that "Sam's Choice" the brand was created early enough during the evolution of the PL ecosystem that Cott coined the name of the brand (even though its almost a complete copy of President's Choice, the PL brand of the Canadian supermarket chain Loblaw), but to consider a PL product a "third party" product is very strange to me. Cott doesn't have any claim to Sam's Choice products that are produced in non-beverage categories.
That just seems naive.
I have been completely incorrect on my interpretation of Amazon's Choice.
Historically when I searched for something, I've often find a product in the results with 80-90% of the features I'm looking for. That result was often listed as Amazon's Choice, so I built it up in my mind to mean "users of Amazon mostly get this one" I was fine with that because, like I said, it usually wouldn't fit the criteria exactly, but it was 80-90% of the way there so it made sense to me that it would be the choice of most people, but not all.
Pedantically, it isn't a lie if it isn't objective and measurable. It's an opinion, and opinions are not lies.
As for "Amazon's Choice", it's literally true. Amazon chose it. They make no representation as to why they chose it.
I'm a tech savvy 30-something cynic, too. Think about how it would fool others.
If the name of the product or brand line was "Amazon's Choice" then I would consider it branding. But when used as a designation, I expect more.
And that's in no way scandalous?
And this is just accepted. Ridiculous.
I mean, I guess it's OK to be outraged about this. But doing it specifically about Amazon seems maybe a little unobjective.
I will almost subconsciously assign a negative mark to companies who aggressively market, and a positive mark to those I deem authentic (spoiler, very few). I'm at the point now that I'm saving a ton of money because I'm simply turned off by the hard sell. It's like when you immediately close a tab on an article you were about to read because 4 different "Join our newsletter" modals slid in. I'm guessing I'm not the only one (but maybe one of few?). Is it possible that marketing practices have gotten so out of hand that they are very gradually nudging consumers away from what they're selling?
Anyone know if marketers talk about this sort of backlash at w/e conventions they have, or is it just push push push. The data must identify at least a hint of a negative trend right? How long until there are "authenticity consultants"?
At least in the EU that's blatantly illegal.