Amazon & Their relationship with Stakeholders

Nowadays, PR has a irreplaceable role in nurturing the relationship between corporation and stakeholders. Argenti and Barnes also said that “As more management teams recognized the need for developing relationships via communications, PR began its transition from a backroom mechanism to a central function within corporations. The backroom-to-boardroom evolution happened concurrently with the increased importance of brand and corporate reputation, two intangible assets that communicators are best equipped to handle based on their inherent skills in building and maintaining relationships with stakeholders.” Amazon PR team has updated the company’s annual financial report on the company’s website along with its other achievements, quarterly results, proxy statements and letters to stakeholders in the “InvestorRelations” category. These information, however cannot be found on the Amazon’s social network channels, which we can assume that they only want to use these channels to promote their business and interact with customers.

As a matter of fact, amazon is very transparent with their financial information, as expected of a still-growing giant retailer. When we google for Amazon’s financial health, most of the first articles come up are from NASDAQ, Google finance and Yahoo finance, which are already featured on Amazon’s “Investor Relations” and are all positive announcement of the company’s stock value and Income Statement.

Late in 2016, Amazon created a “boom” when hiring Anne Rung, administrator of the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy, as their new head of Government Relations. The employment of a experienced insider who can connect the company with “huge market opportunities in state and federal e-procurement applications” is a sign that Amazon has never lose their focus on building strong relationship with the GOV. The result came early in February 2017, when Governor McAuliffe announces “NewStrategic Relationship With Amazon Web Services to Expand CybersecurityEducation”, which is the Virginia Cyber Range. In this cooperation, “Amazon Web Service will join the Commonwealth of Virginia and Virginia Tech to support scalable cloud infrastructure and collaborate on cybersecurity educational efforts, enabling the Cyber Range with both content and a closed network for hands-on exercises, competitions, and other simulations.” This is a strategic movement when Amazon want to defeat its competitor, Microsoft Azure, with its government cloud. In the near future, if their communication Department can predict and offer more benefit to the politician’s social program or growing Governmental program, they can have a chance to win over the huge tech giant in this market segment.

It is very easy to find information about Amazon activities engaging with society’s benefit, which is a clear evidence that their team did a great job in making sure their stakeholders know about the contributions. Their activities have covered a wide range from supporting the community, empowering working to charitable donations. However, not as the other big company, Amazon has never published a sustainability report, and the report we can find on CSRHub does not show an impressive result in the company’s CSR Rating. We can have a look at the chart below:

Source: CSRHub

By getting a new “dream team” to fix the company's sustainability reputation, we can look forward to see a new positive change in Amazon’s CSR rate, which can start with changing the way they created program in responding with society’s need but forgot to foresaw upcoming crisis that could happen and prepared a social program to deal with it.