The Evolution of a Brand
At the 2009 Retailing Smarter symposium, CEO Tony Hsieh broke down the evolution of the Zappos brand:
1999: Selection (of shoes)
2003: Customer Service
2005: Culture and Core Values as their Platform
2007: Personal Emotional Connection
2009: Delivering Happiness
Several key take-aways for smart business people:
- A strong brand is constantly evolving, but not changing directions. This is critical. You probably don’t want or need to re-invent your brand, but you also can’t be stagnant. (It’s also interesting to see how a brand’s logo can evolve over time.)
- Strong brands tend to move up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. Zappos continues to move in a more humanistic direction. They’ve always been about people, but now they are moving upward to a more meaningful connection with their customers and employees. Delivering happiness is a tall order, but simply holding that intention will create new opportunities to wow their customers and employees and lead to greater loyalty.
For anyone interested in the power of brand loyalty and how to build a business for the long-term, Zappos is an ideal company to study. Zappos demonstrates that many of the intangible qualities of business like values, culture and willingness are more important than many transactional-oriented executives care to believe. Otherwise, why would anyone care about a shoe e-tailer? And how could they grow by approximately 7,800% annually for the last nine years?
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With the breaking news today of Amazon acquiring Zappos, how do you think Zappos will now evolve as a brand?
A fine question. According Hsieh’s letter to his employees (http://blogs.zappos.com/ceoletter), Amazon is going to take a hands-off approach and will let Zappos continue to develop it’s thriving culture and evolving brand.
That said, as an investor, when the company you own stock in gets bought out by another company, it’s often time to sell your shares because there’s a whole new host of variables to deal with. It’s very difficult to maintain your culture when you have a parent company with wants and needs. The separate geographic locations can help Zappos preserve the evolution of the brand. If Hsieh or Lin leaves, however, that’s a different story. Ultimately, time will tell …