What We Learned from an Amazon Commercial

We were both sitting on our couch watching our current favorite show, America’s Got Talent. It was a normal evening. The kids were in bed, and we had a romantic evening planned of photo editing and blogging while watching our show. Then, something caught our attention. Like literally reached out and grabbed us, made us stop what we were doing, and watch.

Whether you love them or hate them, Amazon is a market force that is going nowhere. Nowhere but up at least. They have infiltrated just about every conceivable market. They are a market disrupter like no other. The decline in retail sales at conventional shopping malls and department stores is being coined, ‘The Amazon Effect’ because of the huge impact they have had on how we shop. Even market giants like Walmart are having to adapt their own business strategies to try to compete.

There is a lot we can all learn from a company like Amazon. But market dominance and disruption is not what we are here to talk about today. It was their commercial that grabbed our attention, tugged at our heart strings, and taught us something valuable about perception.

The Commercial

In case you haven’t seen the commercial we are talking about, let us set it up for you. It opens to a husband and wife with their young baby girl. They walk in from the day and their faithful dog is there to greet them, wanting to spend time with his owners. The scene breaks to the family on the living room floor, the parents engaging with their baby as she plays with a stuffed animal lion. In walks the beautiful Golden Retriever who wants to join in, and the baby loses it! She was scared and frightened. To her, the family dog was a big, scary animal! That’s when the dad gets the clever idea to hop on Amazon Prime and place an order to help the situation. The commercial snaps to later in the evening, with the dog walking in with a lion’s mane around his head. The dog walks into the same living room and right up to the baby, who cautiously reaches out her hand to pet him. Commercial cuts, Amazon saved the day!

Tear jerker.

Especially with the soft sappy music playing in the background about everyone just wanting to be together.

If you haven’t seen it, watch below! (Grab a tissue first):

A Meaningful Disguise

There is no doubt this was a great ad by Amazon’s Marketing team. If we didn’t use Amazon already, we would have signed up right then and there! But we also saw something deeper that stuck out to us as we watched it.

If you think about it, nothing changed about the dog. The dog was still, the dog. It was still a Golden Retriever. It was still gigantic in comparison to the size of the baby. So why was she so receptive to him? What changed? The only thing that changed was her perspective. Just because the dog had the lion mane around it’s head didn’t make it any less a dog. It was a dog seen through a different lens. A dog dressed to be something more familiar. More approachable. Less daunting and scary.

Thinking about it as an adult, it seems silly that the baby would be scared of the family pup, but we recognize her perspective and it makes sense that she was scared, right?

So, we thought, how many of the ‘big, scary’ things in our lives really aren’t that big and scary?How many of the things we fret and fear about are really something so simple and approachable? If we ‘dressed’ them up in a more familiar and comfortable way and instead of turning away in fear, we approached them with confidence. How many of those things would look different if we changed our perspective?

Put a Mane On It

For us, some of the scary things we have faced could have easily been situations where we said, ‘no way, not worth it!’ and turned away. The choice for Jon to leave his full-time job to go full-time after our dreams was one that scared us. It took a change in perspective to realize that it we let our fear hold us back, we’d always be wondering, ‘What if…?’

Heck, even the fact that you are reading this right now meant we forced ourselves to change our perspectives! Neither one of us consider ourselves to be savvy writers by nature. It is something we have to work at and grow at daily. It something we have to push ourselves on every. single. time. Committing to blogging daily was something we shied away from for forever!  But we literally put a lion mane around that problem and decided that if we never started, we’d never get better! And, if us writing daily could encourage even just one person. If we could relate to one wife, husband, mom, dad, business owner, creative, than it would be completely worth it. That change in perspective has fueled us forward to be committed to it, and you know what? We’ve seen a difference. We’ve heard from so many of you who have been encouraged, and it continues to drive us to what we do.

So what is it in your life that needs a change of perspective? Is it the fitness goals you have felt scared to commit to? Is the mid-term paper that seems impossible to accomplish? Maybe it’s an investment opportunity or a job interview. It could even be that email you’ve been needing to hit ‘send’ on to the local vendor you’ve been dying to work with. No matter what the situation it is in your life, a change of perspective makes all the difference.

Those fitness goals aren’t really that scary, they just take getting started and committing to putting in the time, one day at a time! That mid-term paper isn’t impossible – it’s achievable and the gateway to your future opportunities! The investment opportunity or job interview isn’t something to shy away from! Pray it through, test it, and if it passes the ‘smell test’, chase after it! And the email you’ve been waiting hit send on…sure you’re putting yourself out there and taking a risk, but it could also be the inquiry that opens the door to new opportunities for your business.

We hope this challenges you to find the Golden Retrievers in your life and dress them up in a lion mane. After all, our “lion” is what gave us the opportunity to share this with you.