Sandbox

Zappos and the value of corporate culture

July 24th, 2009 by Nico Luchsinger

Everybody talks about how important corporate culture is. But often, companies tend to see investments in corporate culture as «luxury» – something that is nice to have, but doesn’t really have a monetary value.

Well, two days ago, online retail giant Amazon bought online shoe seller Zappos; they paid almost one billion dollars in shares and cash.

Why did Amazon do that? There logistics are unparalleled; it would have been easy for them to start selling shoes on their own (In fact, they already tried that).

But it wasn’t about the shoes. Zappos is successful mainly for two reasons: 1. They have an amazing customer service. 2. They have leveraged social media to build their business.

Both things only worked because of the corporate culture that Zappos has: They try to make their employees as happy as possible. And encourage them in turn to make the customers as happy as possible, too. And they have enough confidence in their employees to let them use social media without corporate communications watching over their shoulder all the time. And the employees reward this trust by being the best Zappos ambassadors, online and offline.

So corporate culture does have a clear value, it seems. In this case, it is almost a billion dollars. Not bad.

(Picture by lowlevelrebel)

Nico has co-founded Sandbox and has, sadly, never bought shoes at Zappos so far. But if they ever ship to Switzerland, he probably will.