If you were asked a few years ago if you could build a brand through customer service, or if focusing on your culture is the best way to build a brand, chances are you would have answered "No" or "Maybe". But you can be forgiven for thinking that, since that would have been before you knew the story of Zappos and its CEO, Tony Hsieh (@zappos).
Because of what I had heard about the Zappos story, I was happy to receive a free advanced copy of the book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose by Tony Hsieh to review for this blog. The best way to summarize the book is that it's part autobiographical, part a history of Zappos, but most importantly part blueprint for how Zappos has focused on its culture and customer service to build a very successful brand and company that was ultimately acquired by Amazon.
The first section about Tony's life and his first successful company, LinkExchange, is not what I was looking for out of this book but it does give you some insights into what led Tony to take the approach he did with Zappos. And since it's a quick read, I was able to breeze through that section.
I was more interested in the next section about how Zappos started and some of it's early successes and failures as I find you can always learn from what others have done. Surprising to me, as I didn't know the details, Zappos almost went out of business a few times as it was running out of money. If Tony had not had a successful exit prior to Zappos it may not be here today as he invested a lot, almost all, of his own money into it to keep things going for the first few years. While this was interesting, I had no idea that the real insights lay ahead.
The chapter called a Platform for Growth is the best part of the book by far as it goes into the why and how Zappos decide to make their brand about customer service; how they determined the core values of the company; and how they used the Zappos culture to build the brand. While I'm the type of person to read a book from cover-to-cover, if you are not, I strongly encourage everyone at a start-up, and larger companies too, to read at least this chapter and think about how you can use these critical lessons from Zappos to build your brand.
In this chapter, Tony shares the 10 core values that define the Zappos brand and explains the importance of each in detail. Stories from real Zappos employees are used as examples of each value throughout this chapter. Now to be clear, and I believe Tony says this too, you can't just take these 10 values and apply them to your company but you can look at the model and figure out what makes sense for your company.
In the end, the important takeaway for me was a reminder that your brand is really the essence of what your company is all about. And while Tony uses the notion of "delivering happiness" to build the Zappos brand, you can make your brand about whatever you want but you need to ensure that it is instilled in the core values of your start-up.
While I've written about simple and differentiated messaging and credible marketing a lot recently in this blog, it is all part of the larger and very important concept of the brand you want to build for your company. You can learn a lot about one way to build your brand in the book Delivering Happiness.
The Delivering Happiness book team (@dhbook) was kind enough to give me an extra copy of the book to giveaway to a reader on this blog. To make things interesting, I'll give the book to the person who offers up the best story about how they, or their company, went above and beyond to deliver happiness to one of their customers and build their brand. Please leave your story in the comments below or a link to where I can read about it. I'll decide on the best story received by June 15 and let you know.
[Image courtesy of Delivering Happiness]
Hi Henry,I'm reading your Manifesto at the monemt and loving it. SHARE's come a long way since we worked together and we're a pretty happy organisation I think we do a lot of the things you talk about but there's still a lot to do, and in particular to make sure that we're not only happy, but also high performing. Recently got IiP bronze, and we've refocussed our recruitment so that there's a bias towards attitude. Transparency and ensuring that everyone has a voice means that we're weathering the funding squeeze much better than a lot of organisations, because everyone's part of the solution. Hope all's well with you, and thank you for your inspirational writing.Annie xps you might enjoy my novel, Charity Begins with Murder see Amazon Kindle store or Lulu.com for the paperback.
Posted by: Nidhi | 05/21/2012 at 08:11 PM