Amazon dominates in a way other companies don't. It's a technology company with a physical presence. Over the past year, Amazon has added about 25,000 employees. It's planning to build a new 3.3-million–square-foot headquarters near downtown Seattle, complete with biospheres. It's expanding its square footage by additional millions as it builds new warehouses across the U.S. and around the world.

Amazon has reached a point in its evolution where the company is now surfing a feedback loop of dominance. Rising sales generate revenue that Amazon pours into expansion that leads to even greater sales. The concept of online shopping itself has become more or less synonymous with Amazon, as in "I could buy that at the store, or I could by it on Amazon"—a fact reflected in Amazon's domination of a new survey in which the company topped a list of 1,500 brands rated on how consumers perceive their value.

Harris Interactive polled more than 38,000 U.S. residents to gauge brands' "equity," a concept that measures familiarity, perceptions of quality and how likely consumers are to consider buying a given brand's product or service. Amazon not only topped the 2013 poll—"the first time in recent memory this distinction has been held by a brand outside the candy category," Harris says—but achieved the highest overall score in its EquiTrend survey's 25-year history.

I'm guessing Amazon's performance in the poll, in which the company bested every brand from Southwest to Michelin to Coca-Cola, reflects perceptions of the company as a monolith of competence. Amazon isn't a company you want to hug; it's a company that does exactly what it says it will do—every time. I once heard a consultant define "brand" as "the promise of performance reinforced through experience." Amazon promises to deliver the broadest selection of stuff at the lowest prices with minimal hassle. Over and over again, Amazon relentlessly reinforces that promise through the experiences of its more than 180 million annual customers, who bought an estimated 3.5 billion items last year.

The imperturbable consistency with which Amazon does what it says it will do has also made the company by far the first thing shoppers think of when they want to buy something on the internet, according to Harris. In the poll, more than half of respondents said Amazon was the first site they went to when shopping online. The next three runners-up—eBay, Google and Walmart—all scored percentages in the single digits.

Of course, consistency is always a step away from stagnation for tech companies. One Amazon experiment that could gain the company even more traction is its delivery lockers, according to the Harris survey. Nearly half of respondents said they'd be likely or very likely to have orders delivered to Amazon-branded lockers in their area, a rate that rises to nearly two-thirds among younger respondents. Not so interesting to those polled is same-day delivery, a concept Amazon has toyed with, but that doesn't suit the company's highly centralized distribution model. Only about two in 10 Americans polled said they'd be willing to pay extra to get their orders on the same day. Given the popularity of Prime, it seems two-day delivery for a flat annual fee suits most impatient online shoppers just fine.

Despite Amazon's overwhelmingly positive image among consumers—the company also topped Harris' poll a few months back of companies Americans trusted most—there's one dark undercurrent to the company's success. In short, Amazon hardly makes money. Compared to other big tech companies, its profits are pathetic.

Many analysts attribute the poor performance to Amazon's heavy investments in its infrastructure—the means, they say, to even greater dominance in the future. If those projections turn out to be false, the same implacability that has led to Amazon's success could also cause its downfall. Once a promise of performance is made, it can never be broken. If that promise ever proves false, even the most powerful brands can't find shelter from the fury of the American consumer scorned.