Читать книгу The Amazon Management System - Ram Charan - Страница 33

Bezos has rarely finished a speech or an interview about Amazon without talking about customer obsession or customer centricity. The first principle that he stated in his famous nine-point management and decision-making approach published in his first Shareholder Letter in 1997 said, “We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers.” Among all 14 Leadership Principles, Customer Obsession, again, ranked number 1, and has remained at the top ever since.

Why has Bezos been so obsessed with the customers?

As noted earlier, he has always regarded customers as Amazon’s most valuable asset. Customers are the central piece in Amazon’s flywheel and in the entire Amazon platform. Why is Amazon able to aggressively and successfully expand into more and more categories? Because they have customers who would like to buy more. Why are third-party sellers be attracted to the Amazon platform? One of the most obvious reasons is that there are hundreds of millions of customers and, by leveraging Amazon platform, they can scale up much faster.

Despite booming business and growing customer franchise worldwide, Bezos has always remained constantly in awe of customers.

“There is no rest for the weary. I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers. Our customers have made our business what it is, they are the ones with whom we have a relationship, and they are the ones to whom we owe a great obligation. And we consider them to be loyal to us – right up until the second that someone else offers them a better service.” 10

Customers’ trust is an earned privilege, not a long-term benefit to be taken for granted. Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair. That’s probably why Bezos emphasized, “Our pricing objective is to earn customer trust, not to optimize short-term profit dollars.”11

As one of the most (most likely the most) customer-obsessed companies on the planet, Amazon beat out Google and Apple for the top on World’s 500 Most Influential Brands list released by World Brand Lab in 2018.