Brand Building + Social Media = Zappos Example and Employee Advocacy
Brand building can come from advertising, there are a lot of examples out there and best-in-class brand image advertising can be found for most of the worldwide companies like Nike, L’Oreal or Microsoft (though the almighty Richmond company may have missed the point). Brand building can also come from people: customers and people refering to companies who share their personal/ professional brand image as they’re advocating for them. But the best way keeps being when it comes from the company employees. That makes more sense and leads much more business. Zappos may have found the fine tuning to make it an important asset.
Culture book and employee testimonials about the company
Zappos has revealed earlier this year that their new employees would get a $1000 bonus if they quit early, what they call “the offer”. There are also 440 active employees of the company on Twitter, listed on the corporate website. And there are many testimonials of how smart the customer care is, describing why and how the Zappos team is dedicated and close to their customers. And every year a culture book including testimonials of employees about how it is to work at Zappos.
That is a part of the Zappos company culture. And part of the reason this company is one of the fastest growing e-business company with now more than 1400 employees while launched in ‘99. A culture that has changed the brand image by making them proud of their company and advocates of it.
People planning and word of mouth
According to the Pete Blackshaw article on Ad Age, Zappos tends more on spending money on employees than on media planning.
We invest the time and money into hiring and nurturing the right people, as many other companies do in their media planning - Brian Karma, Zappos director of creative services and brand marketing
Knowing that the online shoes selling business is based on confidence in the company that is selling them, the strategy is just smart: empowering people so they keep on being accurate and engaged with their customers to provide them with the best-in-class customer care, making people comfortable with buying shoes online and spreading the word thanks to the customer support.
It’s one strategy that would work for any company, but for sure it’s not a company culture that many can afford to develop. Whether you’ve got it in you DNA, whether you don’t: being able to implement the community management at all levels of a company, the 360 degrees process communities as Ross Mayfield explains, is more like an utopia for many companies that won’t be able to master the social media channel as Zappos do right now. But the next generation of companies may turn it into a basic.
Photo Credit: Boston Wolverine
Despite hype, many enterprises still ambivalent about social media « Marketing Mystic | November 19th, 2008 at 6:00 am #
[...] having a presence is a good start but that by itself is not enough. Companies like Zappos have successfully leveraged social media because they have a highly engaged and [...]