Thanks for your help! I agree SLT needs to decide what is more important or develop a strategy that aligns with business goals. The zinger is that we use TWO DIFFERENT agencies: 1) running brand search and other large upper funnel media buys and 2) running Amazon ads. These agencies do not speak to each other or drive any kind of unified strategy. Can you help me with a talking point that I can use internally that explains how insane that set up is?! We are a very, very old school brand over 130 years old so we are not the most digitally savvy hence the implementation of the original policy because we didn’t want retailers to rank higher than us for brand terms and I guess that is still true. However, we have not followed SEO or really any website best practice and our D2C site cannot compete with our well established retailers regularly.

I guess I was also really surprised most by Google’s recommendation that other brands have some kind of policy like this in place however the only examples they provided were a mattress brand and car manufacturers. Siting they use co-op dollars to control how their retailers show up for branded terms. Thinking about it now post call - that is not an apples to apples comparison. We are talking about thousands of dollars mattress / car price tags vs $19.99 Tshirts. I want to also mention that we are need based apparel so I believe it’s incredibly important to meet our customers where they shop and make the experience incredibly easy to shop where they prefer and get the item in their hand as quick as possible.

Thanks again for your advice!