Introduction

“The past is disputed. The present is well out of hand. All that’s left is the future.”

—Uncle MILT

Exhale.

As a businessperson and private citizen in this brave new tech world of ours, what you’re almost certainly feeling right now is a steamy bouillabaisse of confusion, fear of falling behind, and surreality. Hopefully, there’s some wonder and exhilaration in there too, but whatever you’re experiencing, the pace of the new techonomy feels like it’s accelerating faster every year. That’s because it is. We’ll get into why in a moment, but suffice it to say, companies like Amazon have simultaneously made life easier in many ways yet harder to understand and keep up with in others.

Complex mathematics that only a handful of human beings can comprehend work invisibly and tirelessly on behalf of the customers, companies, and governments they serve. Computations are valuable, literally and figuratively, as the dawn of cryptocurrency has proven, but just like anything man-made they make errors and can be twisted by nefarious actors with less-than-savory intentions. Apprehension toward the unknown is human nature, and since so much depends on these mysterious calculations—from the electricity needed to run the intricate code recipes to the defense, communication, healthcare, transportation, and myriad other systems which enable us to carry out our pursuits of happiness—we’ve grown uneasy about our silent, all-powerful partners. The term “ambient computing” is now a thing. We are so surrounded by connected machines that they’ve come to define our physical environment.

We flesh beings are now thoroughly outnumbered, so we nervously joke amongst ourselves about being their pawns. But are we on the brink of being outthought? In the old days, the fear of machines replacing humans applied only to manual labor. Today, they’re giving our cognitive abilities a run. Consider AlphaZero, a program from Alphabet’s DeepMind Technologies that made headlines in 2017. The software was given nothing more than the basic rules of chess before taking on Stockfish 8, the reigning computer chess world champ. In 100 matches, AlphaZero went 28-0-72. That’s right—it didn’t lose once. And do you know how long it took for the program to achieve mastery on its own, without human intervention, by competing against itself before Stockfish 8? All of four hours. Chess is a fusion of art, logic, and psychology, and now that machine learning is getting into the creativity game, we feel a whole new class of anxiety. It can be argued that advancements like these have contributed to the rise of populism in recent years. Politics is one of the last realms where average people enjoy relevance and some semblance of power over the world around them. The ballot box is where the computer only counts the votes but is not counted among them.

Sometimes I wonder if my role at Amazon and the digital agencies I’ve called home most of my career has contributed to this unease. It’s conceivable that the human mind did not evolve to accommodate this much stimulus, yet here I am, overloading it nonetheless. Am I to blame a little bit for this atmosphere of angst? If you work in tech, media, advertising, marketing, branding, design, or another related field, do you ever ask yourself this question? If so, I’d like to believe it’s because we know we have a responsibility to do right by our fellow man and woman, so it’s probably a good thing we go about our jobs with that lodged in the back of our minds as a sort of moral compass.

When I read of the latest advancements, I’m reminded of a quote from Marshall Berman’s 1982 book on the destructive nature of modernization, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”

I’m confident we can build the former and sidestep the latter. Call me altruistic, but we in the business of communicating to customers on behalf of brands can take the first step toward earning heartfelt loyalty with useful information while doing our honest best to save customers time and money. These are the notions that matter to everyone, everywhere, from every walk of life, no matter what “percent” you are.

That’s why I decided to write this book.

A brand with power isn’t bad. The owner of a brand misusing power certainly is. Money isn’t evil either. Greed at the expense of others is. If we as communications professionals are to weather the brand-pocolypse (already underway if you believe the pundits), we must appeal to the core ideals of the customer as a living, breathing—not necessarily spending—individual. That takes the right technology, sure, but more crucially, a customer-first obligation to empathy.

What You Can Expect from Brand Currency

At Amazon, there are 14 leadership principles (called “LPs”). I’ll delve into them soon, but consistently topping international brand equity and reputation surveys for the past decade doesn’t happen by accident. It requires a total, willful, enterprise-wide commitment to one thing only. While all LPs are important, one reigns supreme: Customer Obsession is far and away the most critical, period. And if you can’t prove you have it top of mind, don’t even bother taking your first phone screen with an Amazon recruiter. It’s not about you and it never was. As such, this book will serve as a guide to making the customer the core of everything you do.

When you truly, honestly obsess over the customer, you’ll begin to understand why a company like General Electric, with a 102-year head start on Amazon, has a market cap of $78.8 billion at the time of this writing, while AMZN’s is $818.95 billion, a 939 percent disparity. You might argue my use of market value as evidence of customer obsession, and you’d be right in some ways. However, I would respond with a few points. First, GE was cofounded by, among others, billionaire financier J. P. Morgan and Alexander Graham Bell, the man who invented the telephone and refined the phonograph. Talk about all the resources and technological advantage in the world. Next, Amazon was founded in a garage by one man, Jeff Bezos, to sell books. How, in less than a quarter-century, has Amazon risen to such prominence, while GE has retreated to single-digit stock value? Customer obsession. That’s it. That’s everything. That’s all, folks.

So as we struggle to deal with these turbulent times (when have times not been turbulent?), there actually is no fog. You can exhale again, this time with confidence. The answer’s been right in front of you your whole career. To borrow from the mouth of the South, James Carville: it’s the customer, stupid. Now of course, you’re not stupid, esteemed reader. Businesspeople have simply not been conditioned to work under a mindset in which customers are decision one. I was guilty of it for a year even after I started at Amazon. Now, I’m going to show you how that most peculiar company does it—and how you can too.

For nearly six years, I was a creative leader at Amazon Advertising, specifically a group called Advertising Design and User Experience, or “ADX” for short. ADX handles hundreds of clients the world over and builds experiences to engage customers across the Amazon universe. And contrary to Amazon’s core reputation as an e-commerce company, the majority of ADX’s time was spent creating brand-level campaigns, not e-commerce units. In 2012, I was the first creative director on the ground in ADX’s New York City office; a few years later, the first group creative director at ADX globally; and in 2016, its first-ever executive creative director, based in London. During that journey, I transformed from a client-only agency guy who resisted the LPs as corporate hooey, into a customer-first acolyte. I am now firmly converted because I watched it in action. And it works.

But that’s only half the story. Because I’d spent my pre-Amazon career on the agency side, servicing clients from Mercedes-Benz and P&G to Gucci and Cadillac, I found myself constantly analyzing the Amazon approach against not just how agencies behave but the ways clients approach their businesses. Additionally, at Amazon, I was fortunate to work with the world’s best-known brands across many business sectors in the US, Europe, and Asia. It became apparent that concern over the bottom line and shareholders wasn’t just a US thing. It’s an every-business thing. (The irony is, in my experience, the more you focus on your shareholders, the less each share is ultimately worth.) For now, I’m here to tell you that Amazon is different when it comes to its customer, which is why its success is different.

Ask the former leaders of Toys “R” Us, Radio Shack, Blockbuster, Circuit City, and Borders what they’d have...