Amazon started as an online bookstore in Jeff Bezos’s garage in 1994. Three decades later, it’s one of the most valuable companies in the world — an e-commerce platform, a cloud computing giant (AWS), a streaming service, a smart device manufacturer, a grocery chain, a logistics network, and an AI company. Amazon’s mission and vision statements explain the customer obsession that drives this extraordinary expansion.
Amazon Mission Statement
“To be Earth’s most customer-centric company.”
Eight words that have guided one of the most aggressive expansion strategies in business history. The mission doesn’t mention books, e-commerce, technology, or any specific product — it’s entirely about the customer relationship. “Earth’s most customer-centric” sets the highest possible bar and the broadest possible scope. It doesn’t matter what Amazon sells; what matters is that whatever it does, it does it with the customer at the center.
This framing has been extraordinarily powerful strategically. It justifies expansion into any market where Amazon believes it can serve customers better than existing players. Books, retail, cloud computing, entertainment, grocery, healthcare, logistics — each entry is framed as extending customer centricity into a new domain.
Amazon Vision Statement
“To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”
The vision extends the mission by adding a specific aspiration: “anything they might want to buy online.” This “everything store” concept has been Amazon’s guiding vision since the beginning. The word “discover” is important — Amazon doesn’t just want customers to find what they’re looking for; it wants them to find things they didn’t know they wanted. This drives Amazon’s recommendation algorithms, product discovery features, and continuous expansion of product categories.
Analysis
Strengths. Amazon’s mission is arguably the most strategically effective of any major company. Customer centricity as an organizing principle has driven innovations like one-click ordering, Prime membership, same-day delivery, customer reviews, and the most sophisticated recommendation engine in e-commerce. The mission statement provides clear strategic direction while being broad enough to accommodate virtually unlimited expansion.
Weaknesses. “Customer-centric” for Amazon’s retail customers can mean aggressive negotiation with suppliers, intense working conditions in fulfillment centers, and competitive practices that smaller businesses find destructive. The mission optimizes for customer value, but critics argue it does so at the expense of workers, small businesses, and competitive market health.
In 2026, Amazon under CEO Andy Jassy faces multiple strategic fronts: maintaining e-commerce dominance against Walmart’s digital push, growing AWS amid fierce cloud competition from Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, navigating antitrust scrutiny worldwide, scaling its AI capabilities, and managing a workforce of over 1.5 million people. The mission — customer centricity — provides a consistent strategic compass through this complexity. Whether it adequately accounts for all stakeholders, not just customers, is the ongoing debate.