Jeff Bezos has repeated the same mantra for three decades: two words he credits with Amazon’s astonishing growth from a Seattle garage to the world’s largest company.
Amazon just claimed the No. 1 spot on Fortune’s annual Global 500 list, which ranks companies by annual revenue.
In a rare sit-down interview to mark the milestone, Bezos reflected on the principles that drove Amazon’s success.
The conversation covered innovations that fueled the company’s growth, such as cloud computing, robotics, logistics, and AI. But Bezos repeatedly returned to one overarching principle that shaped Amazon from its first day and continues to guide the company’s decisions today.
Customer obsession
Customer obsession isn’t a marketing slogan. It’s not a mission statement. According to Bezos, it’s the guiding principle behind every major decision Amazon has made.
In fact, it’s so important to Amazon’s history and its future, Bezos repeated the phrase 10 times in the same interview.
The interview should remind founders to find the one principle that matters most because it’ll drive every decision your team makes, even when you’re not there.
Why Jeff Bezos created a repeatable mantra
Customer obsession isn’t a new saying for Bezos. It’s a founding principle that Bezos articulated publicly in his first shareholder letter in 1997.
In my research for The Bezos Blueprint, which explores the storytelling and communication strategies that fueled Amazon’s growth, I analyzed all the shareholder letters Bezos wrote and published from 1997 to 2021, when he stepped down as CEO.
One of Bezos’ greatest strengths as a communicator wasn’t inventing new marketing slogans. Instead, it was identifying the right phrase once and repeating it for decades.
Bezos’ 1997 letter contains 25 references to “customer,” which he went on to use more than 500 times across all his letters.
To put that into perspective, the phrase “cloud” or “cloud computing” appears just 24 times, even though Amazon’s cloud division (AWS) is growing at a “breakneck pace.”
The principle that outlasted every innovation
In 1997, Bezos explained why customer obsession was crucial. He said if a company does everything with the customer in mind, it will lead to “repeat purchases and word of mouth” growth.
Bezos later wrote, “Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.”
Amazon has changed and expanded since 1997. It went from a startup to an e-commerce giant, a cloud computing pioneer, and an AI company.
Over decades, the technology changed, but the founding principle stayed the same.
Every founder needs a defining principle on repeat
Bezos played the role of Amazon’s repeater-in-chief. Every founder should take on this role because a guiding principle doesn’t take hold on its own. It must be consistently and frequently articulated, heard, read, and understood.
What’s your mantra?
For Bezos, obsessing over every aspect of customer experience was the top job. Your mantra might be different. The key is to identify your guiding principles or “obsession.”
Once you land on it, repeat it — not just once or twice but in every meaningful conversation, presentation, or memo.
Identifying the principle that should guide all your company’s decisions isn’t always easy. Start with the audience, in most cases your employees or teammates. Can they answer the question, “What matters most around here?”
Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, was known for building a company with an “employee first” philosophy. He took every opportunity to articulate it.
“If you truly treat your employees that way, they will treat your customers well,” he once said. “Your customers will come back, and that’s what makes your shareholders happy.”
John Mackey, the co-founder of Whole Foods, defined the company’s organizing principle as “nourishing people and the planet.”
Mackey explained that the phrase was “more than a slogan. It became our company’s mantra.”
Bezos, Kelleher, and Mackey had different missions, but they used the same communication discipline — relentlessly communicating an overarching principle that guided every major decision.
Find your defining principle. Make it short enough to remember, meaningful enough to guide decisions, and important enough to repeat ten times in a single conversation.
—Carmine Gallo
This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com.
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