Dive Brief:
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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his company were No. 1 in two surveys conducted by Fortune magazine recently.
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Bezos was the “runaway winner,” according to Fortune, of a survey the magazine conducted among Fortune 500 CEOs about which leader they admire most. “No other CEO got even a third as many mentions,” according to Fortune editor Alan Murray. Earlier this year, Fortune also picked Bezos as its number one “World’s Greatest Leader.”
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And Amazon ranked in the top five for “most influential” among Fortune 100 companies, and first in the categories of “most trustworthy” and “company you’d most like to invest in” in a SurveyMonkey survey of more than 10,000 U.S. adults, conducted in May for Fortune.
Dive Insight:
Amazon has been vexing retailers for two decades and counting, disrupting shopping with superior search capabilities, hugely attractive prices, and its robust Prime program, which provides members with free two-day shipping on many items and several perks that keep members happy (and paying their $99 annual dues year after year).
Prime members are also extremely sticky, converting 74% of the time and purchasing a wide variety of goods from the retailer after coughing up $99 a year in membership fees. By and large, Prime members come from younger, wealthier households, too, counting 70% of upper-income Americans as members.
Amazon was the only company to rank in the top five in both the ‘influential’ and ‘trustworthy’ categories in Fortune’s survey, and ranked number one overall.
The e-retail giant is known for superior customer service, too, and its score on trustworthiness is notable, and, for any retailer, gold.
Amazon is not one to rest on its laurels, either. The company is planning for more brick-and-mortar stores, although it's still working out how many, and to build up its Prime membership program until people feel “irresponsible” if they are not members. Bezos last month promised such upgrades, though he didn’t specify how the company would add to its Prime benefits.
The company has also ventured assertively into apparel sales and is adding more private label goods in an effort to offer customers items that can’t be found anywhere else.
Amazon’s appeal as an investment is less about its prowess as a retailer, though, considering how much it’s buoyed by its AWS cloud service, which is widely seen as its most profitable unit. AWS alone would be Fortune 500 company based on 2015 revenues of nearly $8 billion and a major contributor to its $107 billion in 2015 sales, which, Fortune reports, helped move Amazon to the number 18 spot on its 2016 Fortune 500 list, up from 29 last year.
