The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies. The right way to respond to this if you are a company is toput the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shoutingabout it, marketing it.

Focus relentlessly and passionately on the customer.

I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers.

We've done price elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. We don't do that because we believe, and we have to take this as an article of faith, that by keeping our prices very, very low, we earn trust with customers over time, and that actually does maximize free cash flow over the long term.

If we can arrange things in such a way that our interests are aligned with our customers, then in the long term that will work out really well for customers and it will work out really well for Amazon.

Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient.