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Building loyalty the Hsieh way
Perhaps it has something to do with our general fondness for footwear and do-goodery, because when it comes to delivering a positive image, Zappos.com walks pretty tall even if the headlines are bad.
Zappos.com recently announced that it was the victim of a data breach that affected 24 million customers. Yet it did not appear to suffer the same consumer or media scrutiny as did other companies in the same spot.
This is in part because Zappos.com responded quickly and pretty transparently. But I have a hunch that Zappos.com's investment in goodwill among customers and the press also played a role. Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh, by way of his book Delivering Happiness, has agreeably sat down to interviews with reporters from most major papers and magazines, meaning that he has spent time building a rapport with them. Hsieh is the face of Zappos.com, and it is a smiling face; the two are really one.
Which gets to what really distinguishes Zappos.com: Its efforts are – or at least appear to be – completely genuine. It does not go out and do good things as a strategy; doing good is a business principle.
So when I read a recent (positive) Bloomberg Businessweek article about how Hsieh is investing $350 million of his own money into reviving downtown Las Vegas, I was not at all surprised. I could actually feel the company's stock rising.
And so it is that when Zappos.com announced that it had been hacked, many of us took it personally. Zappos.com is our friend; many of us have had fun conversations with its call center workers, and it invests in the community.
Zappos.com succeeds because it builds emotional connections. And there really is no better way to delivering a good image.
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