There has been a lot of buzz about why Amazon bought Zappos for gazillions of dollars. Well, how much is WOW worth? Zappos has wowed employees, wowed wall street and wowed customers with free shipping, personal service and more to get where they are today. Apparently, they wowed Amazon, too.
At Atomic Ideas, we are big believers in Internal Branding. In other words, we believe that the companies who sell more stuff are the ones that don't just focus on selling stuff to customers.
They also work hard to sell stuff to their employees. They sell them on a brand story... a belief system. They make employees want to be cheerleaders for the brand. They create a culture that is contagious.
Then they take it to the streets through genuine employee evangelism and External Branding to turn prospects into believers (customers), too.
As successful as Amazon is (in most endeavors), they are buying Zappos to study and learn from them, because they are a breakaway brand that has been doing almost everything right.
Oh, and they want to sell more stuff, too. According to the New York Times, Amazon's online shoe site endless.com got 777,000 visitors in 2007. Zappos... 4.5 million.
The picture in this post tells the Zappos Internal Branding story. Go to the site and check it out. It's well worth a look to see how your brand measures up, or find out what you're missing.
Or check out the videos from Zappos.TV below to see how Zappos employees express themselves and spread the word.
Zappos is such a transparent company I'm surprised the employees still wear clothes.
Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh sent an in-depth email to all the employees explaining the deal with Amazon http://tinyurl.com/n3rssc. Normally only upper management gets to see this kind of stuff. Very transparent.
Since he sent the info out as a company-wide email, he knew it would travel outside the company, and it did, and transparency once again.
Two cool companies - a match made in online heaven. Looking forward to see what happens next.
Can you 'buy' a company's culture without adversely impacting said culture through the act of buying it?
Posted by: Gene Brady | 07/31/2009 at 04:22 PM