...[Amazon.love memo]... lays out a vision for how the Amazon founder wants his company to conduct itself and be perceived by the world. It reflects Bezos's values and determination, and perhaps even his blind spots.
"Some big companies develop ardent fan bases, are widely loved by their customers, and are even perceived as cool....For different reasons, in different ways and to different degrees, companies like Apple, Nike, Disney, Google, Whole Foods, Costco and even UPS strike me as examples of large companies that are well-liked by their customers." On the other end of spectrum, [Bezos] added, companies like Walmart, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, and ExxonMobil tended to be feared.
Bezos postulates that this second set of companies was viewed, perhaps unfairly, as engaging in exploitative behavior. (p.317)
....But Bezos was dissatisfied with that simplistic conclusion and applied his usual analytical sensibility to parse out why some companies were loved and others feared.
....On an attached spreadsheet, Bezos listed seventeen attributes, including polite, reliable, risk taking, and thinking big, and he ranked a dozen companies on each particular characteristic. His methodology was highly subjective, he conceded, but his conclusions, laid out at the end of the Amazon.love memo, were aimed at increasing Amazon's odds of standing out among the loved companies. Being polite and reliable or customer-obsessed was not sufficient. Being perceived as inventive, as an explorer rather than a conqueror, was critically important. "I actually believe the four "unloved" companies are inventive as a matter of substance. But they are not perceived as inventors or pioneers. It is not enough to be inventive --that pioneering spirit must also come across and be perceived by the customer base," he wrote. (pp. 318-319)
Source:
Brad Stone, The Everything Store --Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York, NY: Little, Brown, and Company, 2013).
