DTC836: Amazon Brand Building Tactics, Marketing To Gen X, and ChatGPT Outage

Good morning,

Here’s what you’ll find in today’s DTC:

💰 Winning on Amazon in 2025
Why brands can’t rely just on PPC.  

👭 The Forgotten Generation
Marketing to indecisive Gen Xers. 

📦 Daily Tariff Update
U.S and China’s framework trade deal

🤖 Is ______ Down?  Searches exploded after a temporary outage. 

You’re reading this newsletter along with new subscribers from: Foodtastic, Alma Lasers, and Rock Solid Nutrition. 👋

📈 Growth Strategy Is Changing—Don’t Get Left Behind. 1,500+ Global Marketers Reveal The Insights You Need

The most successful B2C brands in 2025 are shifting their focus away from acquisition. 👀

Instead, they’re aligning marketing with customer service, unifying data, and delivering consistent, personalized experiences that keep customers coming back. 🛍️

👉 Klaviyo’s 2025 State Of B2C Marketing Report reveals how top brands are building not just leads, but loyalty—and what’s holding others back. 

From rising CAC to fragmented tech stacks, the report covers today’s biggest challenges and strategies that top brands are using to solve them. 

🤔 If your growth strategy is still campaign-first, it’s time to rethink what drives real ROI. Learn how customer experience is becoming the new performance metric—and how to build around it.

Read the full report to explore insights from 1,500+ global marketers and discover what it takes to grow in today’s B2C landscape. 🚀

💡 Amazon is No Longer an Ads Game, It’s a Brand Game

The days of winning on Amazon with just PPC tricks are fading.

For years, brands could just outbid their competitors and hack their way to success. But today? That’s not enough.

The Pilothouse Amazon team shares that the platform has shifted toward favouring real brands that build real equity.

Here’s what’s changed, and how brands need to adapt:

Creative is now more important than ever.

Beautiful images, Premium A+ content, and storytelling-based Brand Stores aren’t just nice-to-haves, they’re essential.

With the rollout of additional creative capabilities, brands need to create engaging experiences to stand out and capture customers.

Customer experience impacts rankings.

Your return rate, review sentiment, and account health all contribute to visibility.

If your product underperforms post-purchase, you won’t just lose customers, you’ll lose organic rank.

‍Setting the right expectations and ensuring a good first experience is key to maintaining strong account health

Amazon’s algorithm favors brands with strong external signals.

DSP, influencer traffic, social media buzz...these factors all contribute to your success on Amazon by bringing traffic from off-platform to Amazon.

If you’re only running PPC, you’re missing out on off-Amazon traffic sources that give brands a competitive edge. 

The future of Amazon isn’t just about ads, it’s about full-funnel brand building.

So, how do brands come out on top?

Brands that want to dominate need to:

✅ Tell a compelling story through creative.
✅ Leverage multi-channel marketing to drive demand.
✅ Focus on customer retention and experience, not just acquisition.

Amazon is no longer just an ad-driven marketplace, it’s an ecosystem for brand growth.

Amazon success starts with the right conversations. If you’re not discussing these topics with your team or agency, let’s change that.

📈 Revenue? Up. CPA? Down. Results? Delivered.

While many brands are pulling back, Pilothouse clients are scaling with confidence:

• A home and lifestyle brand is seeing: +48% revenue in the last 6 months—while staying efficient
• A service brand is seeing: +33% Google conversions YoY, -22% Google CPA
• Another home and lifestyle brand is seeing: +200% Meta revenue, -25% new customer CPA, +48% new customer ROAS (all since joining Pilothouse in February 2025 ‼️)

In a market where every dollar has to work harder, Pilothouse is helping brands grow with clarity, speed, and control.

Let’s talk about what growth could look like for your brand. 👇

Book a call with our partnerships team now.

📦 Your Daily Tariff Check-In

Whether it’s a minor tweak or a major shift, we’ll keep you posted on the latest tariff changes—so you’re always in the know. 

June 12, 2025 update:

• U.S. Tariff on China Will Total 55% Under New Trade Framework
  
  
  • Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says U.S. tariffs on China will not change from this point onward.
    
  • Previously, the U.S. tariff on China was 145% before dropping to 30% during their 90-day trade truce. In the future, the tariff on China will be 55% (pending approval from China's leader Xi Jinping.)
    
  • Trade tensions between the two economic superpowers have severely impacted businesses during the first half of 2025, disrupting global supply chains.

🎧 Why Gen X Is the ‘Forgotten’ Generation—and How to Market to Them

In this episode of Ad-venturous, Aves delves into Gen X and how you can market to this often overlooked demographic, which values functionality over aesthetics, value over virality, and substance over hype.

“Gen X is overlooked in modern marketing—complex to engage, but highly valuable. Most brands skip them because they’re “hard to capture.”

In this episode, we dive into:

• Gen X Traits: Why this demographic is highly peer-oriented, hard to sway, and indecisive but holds lots of purchasing power.
  
• Cultural influence: How Gen X was impacted by key events like Riot Grrrl, punk, feminism, and early internet adopters.
  
• Creating Ads Targeting Gen X: Focus on proven functionality, brand credibility, and proven product value over flashy ads.
  
• FujiFilm’s Diversification Story: We look at how the camera brand survived by expanding from film to skincare via R&D-led strategy.

👉 Listen to the full episode with Aves here.

📈 Want to scale like the top 1% of ecom operators? Unlock the secrets with Lifetimely by AMP—track P&L, CAC, LTV, and buyer behavior to fuel smarter growth. Get started for free here. *

Searches for ‘ChatGPT’ exploded earlier this week as frantic users found themselves seeing error messages mid-prompt.

Why is this happening? The internet’s favorite AI chatbot experienced a notable surge in search interest following a temporary outage that affected users worldwide.

Users report seeing error messages like ‘too many concurrent requests.’

Issues began early Tuesday morning and lasted for over 10 hours.

OpenAI responded later by saying they identified the problem and it had been resolved. 

‍Why this matters: The ChatGPT outage highlights how online users worldwide are becoming increasingly reliant on AI tools.

📥 Got a B2B Biz? 

Join dozens of B2B companies finding demand-gen success through our niche community of 150k brand leaders and founders this year. Talk to our team to learn more.

Have you heard our latest podcasts?

• 🤔 TWBERP 37: Reviewing Welcome Emails Flows From Top Brands
• 🧊How Shiti Coolers Turned a Joke into A Party Cooler Brand 
• 🥘 AKNF 514: How Hestan Built a 40% Repeat Purchase Rate
• 😃Ad-venturous 5: Are Millennials Cooler Than Everyone Else? 
• 🧑‍💻 TWBERP 36: Retention Programs for Different Cohort Profiles
• 💦 How CharCharms Scaled Hydration Accessories to Nationwide

Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Frances Du. Edited by Eric Dyck.

Please note that items in this newsletter marked with * contain sponsored content.