Your Brand and Amazon Echo

It's still not clear what the impact of home voice devices will be on brands and marketing, but the early evidence suggests that the value of a brand is as important as ever.

According to eMarketer, when consumers use voice search on AMZN Echo for products and don’t specify a brand—e.g., "paper towels" rather than "Brawny paper towels"— Alexa first suggests an AMZN’s Choice item 54% of the time, followed by the top search result 41% of the time and a Sponsored Product 6%.

Meanwhile, when a shopper searches by voice for a product for which AMZN has a private-label version, Alexa suggests it 17% of the time, despite private labels only making up 2% of products sold on the site. 

However, once a shopper buys a specific brand on AMZN, Alexa does tend to suggest it going forward; neither AMZN Echo nor Google Home is offering paid search advertising yet, so brands must rely on good old-fashioned name recognition rather than a hard sell for now.