For digital-first brands, scaling from the first 1,000 customers to a million-strong base is not just a milestone - it’s a test of resilience, creativity, and strategy. Those initial thousand customers often come from personal networks, early adopters, or word-of-mouth buzz. But when the ambition is scale, the challenge shifts from organic discovery to structured new customer acquisition (NCA).
The latest thought paper by Amazon Ads, Moving from 1,000 to 1,000,000 Customers, positions NCA as the primary lever for growth in India’s digital-first economy. After exploring brand building and new product launches in previous years, the 2025 thought paper focuses on the most pressing challenge for growth brands today: acquiring new customers in a competitive and cluttered landscape.
Why new customer acquisition matters more than ever
The report underscores a simple truth: new customers drive growth. As per Amazon’s internal study, 66% of revenue is derived from new customers across sectors.
As explained through Byron Sharp’s Double Jeopardy Model, unlike leader brands that enjoy both scale and loyalty, challenger brands face a double challenge: fewer customers and lower loyalty. To compensate, they need to acquire a disproportionately higher percentage of new customers to grow.
Always-on explorers: The new Indian consumer
A striking finding from the paper is that Indian consumers are “always-on explorers.” Survey insights reveal that the share of new customers remains consistently high across the year - around 69% on average. Contrary to popular belief, new customer acquisition isn’t an event-driven phenomenon restricted to festive sales or big-ticket launches. Yes, spikes do occur, such as a 3% increase during festive periods and a 10% surge after new product launches, but the baseline curiosity of Indian shoppers remains consistent.
Understanding the two cohorts of new customers
The report highlights two distinct cohorts that shape new customer acquisition. New-to-Brand (N2B) customers are already familiar with a category but choose to switch from one brand to another. New-to-Category (N2C) customers, meanwhile, are experiencing the category for the first time. The balance between these cohorts varies: in established categories such as grocery, home, and beauty, N2B customers are stronger, while in emerging or occasional categories like luxury beauty or furniture, N2C customers contribute more significantly.
For marketers, this nuance is crucial: the acquisition messaging must be tailored to the audience that they are trying to reach.
Why retail media wins the first purchase
When it comes to trying a new brand, retail media is the channel of choice. The YouGov study cited in the paper reveals that 88% of customers prefer retail media channels like Amazon to discover and experiment with new brands.
The reasons are straightforward: ease of discovery, with algorithms and storefronts surfacing relevant options; trust, built through reviews, ratings, and secure transactions; and convenience, enabled by seamless checkouts and easy returns. Together, these make retail media not just an advertising channel but a trusted launchpad for brand discovery and conversion. In short, a game-changer for digital-first brands competing in a fragmented media environment.
Cracking the challenges of acquisition
Amazon Ads outlines a three-pillar framework for addressing challenges in customer acquisition: Educate, Connect, and Drive Action.
The report guides brands to first educate consumers, particularly in a region where lack of awareness and low understanding remain major barriers.
Education goes beyond product descriptions and also includes building conviction through storytelling, demonstrations, and formats that immerse audiences in both the functional benefits and the emotional promise of a product. The insights show that when brands take this approach, the impact is measurable. Campaigns that focus on education have often seen a sharp lift in branded searches and higher conversion rates. Mamaearth’s Rice Water range is a clear example. By leaning into the cultural wave of Korean beauty content and collaborating with Amazon MX Player, the brand embedded shoppable video ads in shows with high youth affinity. The result was not only a 77% ad recall but also a tangible uplift in awareness, favorability, and purchase intent.
The second challenge is trust, a skepticism many consumers carry toward new brands. The report highlights that credibility is best earned by building a connect between the brand and consumers’ lifestyles and communities, often through authentic voices or cultural integration. Insights backs this up: trust-building campaigns have delivered double-digit improvements in both brand favorability and purchase intent. Realme’s campaign for its GT Pro smartphone illustrates this. By sponsoring Hip Hop India on Amazon MX Player and embedding its story into a culturally resonant property, the brand achieved strong lifts in awareness, favorability, and purchase intent, proving that connection thrives when brands participate in passions consumers care about.
Finally, there is the challenge of driving action at the critical moment of purchase. Consumers may be aware and even convinced, but unless a brand is visible when intent peaks, the opportunity is lost.
The Full-Funnel Way Forward
The paper also highlights that a full-funnel approach that has a combination of all three pillars can help digital-first brands scale further. Education fuels awareness, connection builds credibility, and action secures conversion. Each layer strengthens the next, and together they create the kind of sustainable acquisition engine that can propel a brand from its first 1,000 customers to its first million.
For instance, by deploying a full-funnel strategy, from 15-second awareness videos on Amazon MX Player to contextual display ads and top-of-search placements through Sponsored Products - Lego achieved a 163% increase in sales and expanded its market segment share by 53%. It became the fastest-growing toy brand on Amazon India.
“At Amazon Ads, our full funnel ad solutions help businesses of all sizes grow and reach their relevant audiences. From video ads on Prime Video, Amazon MX Player and Sponsored TV that drive awareness, to immersive brand stores, live sessions, and influencer collaborations that build trust, and sponsored products, display, and DSP ads that capture high-intent shoppers at the moment of purchase, Amazon Ads offers a full-funnel toolkit. Together, these formats allow brands to educate, connect, and drive action seamlessly across the customer journey,” said Kapil Sharma, Director, Amazon Ads India.
For India’s digital-first brands, the path to scale lies not in sporadic bursts of visibility but in disciplined, always-on customer acquisition. The opportunity is immense: consumers are curious, retail media is trusted, and ad technologies now enable precise, meaningful engagement.
This thought paper by Amazon Ads makes a compelling case for a mindset shift. Brands must stop viewing acquisition as a campaign and start treating it as a continuous, full-funnel journey.
Those who master this will not only add customers, they will build movements, cultures, and communities that sustain them from a thousand to a million and beyond.
Scan the QR code to download the Thought Paper by Amazon Ads
