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Jeff Bezos: Your Brand Is Just Your Reputation. Treat It That Way.

By Jeff Bezos · Marketing · 1 min read

Brands for companies are like reputations for people. Reputations are hard-earned and easily lost. You can't ask for trust — you have to do it the hard way, one step at a time.

Key Points

A brand is a reputation — hard-earned and easily lost
You can't ask for trust. Make a promise, then fulfill the promise. Over and over.
Amazon's most important intellectual property is the brand name — what it stands for

Brands for companies are like reputations for people. Reputations are hard-earned and easily lost.

The Most Important IP

Bezos: Our most important piece of intellectual property is our brand name. This is very important for anybody who's going to start a company — brands for companies are like reputations for people. Reputations are hard-earned and easily lost.

The most important intellectual property a company can have — for us, it's Amazon. That name. But what it stands for.

Brands for companies are like reputations for people. Hard-earned and easily lost.

You Can't Ask for Trust

Bezos: We've worked very hard to earn trust. You can't ask for trust. You just have to do it the hard way. One step at a time. You make a promise and then fulfill the promise. You say 'we'll deliver this tomorrow' — and then you actually deliver it tomorrow.

If you do that over and over again, ultimately you can instill your company's name with a reputation. Sometimes people talk about brands in this very amorphous way. But for me, I like to think of it as a person — what is the reputation that person has, and how have they earned that reputation?

You can't ask for trust. You make a promise, fulfill it. Do that over and over again.