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Executive takeaway
- Amazon failures are rarely tactical; they are organizational.
- Splitting ownership between marketing, ecommerce, and finance creates structural misalignment.
- Amazon requires a dedicated operating model with explicit decision rights.
- Without arbitration rules, media efficiency and margin will always conflict.
Why Amazon problems are usually organizational
When Amazon performance deteriorates, the response is often tactical:
adjust bids, refresh creatives, renegotiate pricing, push inventory.
Yet in most organizations, the root cause sits elsewhere.
Amazon is managed through overlapping responsibilities, unclear decision rights, and conflicting incentives.
Marketing optimizes visibility and ROAS.
Ecommerce focuses on assortment, listings, and Buy Box.
Finance reviews margin after outcomes are locked.
Each function acts rationally in isolation.
Collectively, the system fails.
The ownership fallacy
A common question inside organizations is: “Who owns Amazon?”
The question itself is flawed.
Amazon cannot be owned by a single function without distorting incentives.
It cuts across marketing, pricing, supply chain, and finance.
What CMOs need is not ownership, but governance.
That means defining who decides what, under which constraints, and based on which metrics.
Separating responsibilities from decision rights
In a healthy Amazon operating model, execution and arbitration are deliberately separated.
A practical structure looks like this:
- Marketing executes advertising within predefined efficiency and margin boundaries.
- Ecommerce owns assortment, content quality, availability, and Buy Box mechanics.
- Finance defines acceptable contribution margins and validates trade-offs.
Crucially, none of these teams unilaterally sets the rules.
The rules are defined at operating-model level, not at channel level.
The real conflict: media efficiency versus margin
The central tension on Amazon is not growth versus brand.
It is media efficiency versus contribution margin.
Advertising can improve ROAS while lowering margin.
Price reductions can improve volume while increasing ad dependency.
Inventory buffers can protect Buy Box while increasing working capital risk.
Without explicit arbitration rules, these tensions are resolved implicitly—usually in favor of short-term volume.
Budget arbitration as a governance mechanism
In mature organizations, Amazon budgets are not “marketing budgets.”
They are conditional budgets.
This means:
- Advertising budgets are tied to margin thresholds, not fixed annual envelopes.
- Incremental spend requires validation against contribution, not just ROAS.
- Defensive spend is explicitly separated from growth spend.
This shifts the conversation from “Can we spend more?” to “Under what conditions does spending still make sense?”
Centralized versus local decisions
Not all Amazon decisions should be centralized.
Not all should be local.
Confusing the two creates friction or fragility.
A simple rule of thumb:
- Centralize pricing guardrails, margin targets, attribution logic, and portfolio-level spend rules.
- Localize keyword selection, creative testing, tactical bid adjustments, and assortment nuances.
Centralization protects economics.
Localization protects speed.
Both are required.
The role of the CMO
In this model, the CMO’s role is not to run Amazon day-to-day.
It is to ensure that Amazon is governed as part of the company’s growth system.
This includes:
- Aligning Amazon objectives with broader brand and portfolio strategy
- Ensuring measurement reflects business reality, not platform optics
- Forcing explicit trade-offs when incentives conflict
When Amazon is treated as a special case, it creates exceptions.
When it is treated as an operating system, it creates discipline.
What comes next
Even with the right operating model, Amazon can easily regain control if guardrails are missing.
In the final article, we will examine how CMOs can protect brand and margin over time—without leaving the platform.