What makes a great brand great?

What makes a great brand great, really? Is it that it has a purpose? Is it that it has a great story, perhaps about its founding and how the founder discovered a purpose? Is it about seizing opportunity and staying competitive? Or is it about creativity, the mechanics of effective marketing, or just good timing and luck? I suspect each of these have been at the core of making some great brands great somewhere... when they’ve gotten it right. But what’s it take to get it right?

I don’t know what the formula is for making a brand great — sorry! I only know how to keep score and how to use my scoring technique to help make sure the Amazon and Prime brands are as authentic, relevant and well understood as possible. It’s my job to do so, and I love doing my job. But let’s face it, purpose can evolve, stories lose their luster, competition always exists, creativity isn’t a constant and the mechanics of marketing alone, while necessary, probably aren’t enough — and luck is luck and not all brands have it. That’s why I like to keep score.

When people ask me what makes a great brand great (and they sometimes do), I tell them I don’t know, like I’ve told you, and then I tell them about what I think it takes to score 10 out of 10 points in the adventure of marketing, on the way to brand greatness, or at least brand relevance — if you’re lucky.

The first eight points of great marketing and of building a great brand, in my view, and certainly at Amazon, are scored by delivering a great customer experience. If a product or service is remarkable, then customers will say nice things and those nice words attract other customers – and as we all know, the best kind of marketing is positive word-of-mouth because it’s authentic, it’s credible and it’s free. Building a great brand is first and foremost about creating a great experience.

Understanding segment opportunities, how customers respond to existing products and dreaming up big ideas as part of a business team is brand building, too. In fact, when we start thinking about a new idea at Amazon we work backwards from a press release or a blog post to help us imagine whether the idea will be compelling enough to the customer. And writing a press release is often also what marketing does to actually launch a product. So, if eight out of 10 points of great marketing, of building a great brand, are scored by building a great product, then building a great product requires thinking like a marketer too.

The ninth point of great marketing is earned by getting the right message to the right customer at the right moment at the right cost, and at scale. You can think of this as performance marketing, often delivered as digital marketing, usually highly targeted, frequently requiring many messaging variations, and ideally directly measurable and automated. Marketing here is about science and technology in addition to creativity. While word-of-mouth is the best, it’s rarely sufficient. Building a business and a brand requires engagement. Engagement requires traffic to your business. And attracting traffic at scale, usually requires engineering. You get the ninth point when you get that right.

The 10th point in my mental model, and the one that prompts the branding discussion, is about amplifying the truth about a great product or service, what a brand stands for, and why a company does what it does. Sometimes this truth is told through PR or mass advertising, but most importantly it’s told through our actions. This, to me, is where the story matters most and why telling the story is very important, but why living the story is absolutely critical. 

The truth about the Amazon brand is that it is formed from millions of actions taken by hundreds of thousands of team members every day. The brand lives in how we make it easy to search and find that product you need, in getting the product to the right destination, in delivering it on time to the right location, in having Alexa answer your questions in the moment, in helping you laugh or gasp while watching The Boys on Prime Video, and even in how we help serve up content on Netflix via AWS. The brand is in the imagination and grit it takes to invent these experiences and in the determination it takes to make them work better and better every day. 

Amazon is what I like to think of as a small ‘b’ brand. Where many big ‘B’ brands have a manifesto that describes their purpose, that frames their story, that drives how they show up, what they say about themselves and sometimes it intentionally limits the focus of the experiences they build, a small ‘b’ brand focuses first on the experience and lets what the brand stand for emerge from its actions. At Amazon, our Capital ‘C’ Customer Obsession fuels innovation that drives the experience in any direction that might delight our customers, and the experience delivered then determines the brand impression, not the other way around. 

There is no brand manifesto at Amazon, just leadership principles, motivation, and purpose and Amazon’s leadership principles begin with Customer Obsession. We’re motivated to invent on behalf of customers, to help make lives a bit easier, a bit better, and even a bit more fun. Our purpose is to find the best future we can, together with our customers, employees, selling partners, the communities we operate in, and the earth. We do this for customers when we deliver the best of shopping and entertainment with Prime. We do this with our employees by leading on minimum wages and investing in programs like Career Choice. We do this with selling partners through programs like Fulfillment by Amazon that have helped third-party sellers grow faster than our own retail business. We do this by working with local communities to address homelessness, with our support of organizations like Mary’s Place. And we work to help save the planet when we commit to be net carbon neutral by 2040, 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement, and by encouraging others to join us with The Climate Pledge.

The truth about the Amazon brand is that it is built by inventors working hard to find the best future we can, with and for others and for ourselves, and we approach every day as though it’s still day one. We’re optimistic about the future, but where optimism believes in a better day, optimism with inventiveness and grit makes every day better.

Our way is not the only way to build a business or a relevant brand and I don’t believe we’ll ever earn a perfect score or consider our brand “great”, because customer expectations will always rise (as they should), and there will always be more work to done. Being a Capital ‘C’ customer obsessed company more than Capital ‘B’ brand works for us — and we hope it works for you.

What do you think makes a great brand great?