Delivering Happiness

Your Culture Is Your Brand
Building a brand today is very different from building a brand 50
years ago. It used to be that a few people got together in a room,
decided what the brand positioning was going to be, and then spent a
lot of money buying advertising telling people what their brand was.
And if you were able to spend enough money, then you were able to
build your brand.
It’s a very different world today. With the Internet connecting
everyone together, companies are becoming more and more
transparent whether they like it or not. An unhappy customer or a
disgruntled employee can blog about a bad experience with a
company, and the story can spread like wildfire by e-mail or with
tools like Twitter.
The good news is that the reverse is true as well. A great
experience with a company can be read by millions of people almost
instantaneously as well.
The fundamental problem is that you can’t possibly anticipate
every possible touch point that could influence the perception of your
company’s brand.
For example, if you happen to meet an employee of Company X
at a bar, even if the employee isn’t working, how you perceive your
interaction with that employee will affect how you perceive
Company X, and therefore Company X’s brand. It can be a positive
influence, or a negative influence. Every employee can affect your
company’s brand, not just the front-line employees that are paid to
talk to your customers.
At 
Zappos.com
, we decided a long time ago that we didn’t want
our brand to be just about shoes, or clothing, or even online retailing.
We decided that we wanted to build our brand to be about the very
best customer service and the very best customer experience. We
believe that customer service shouldn’t be just a department, it
should be the entire company.
Advertising can only get your brand so far. If you ask most people
what the “brand” of the airline industry as a whole is (not any

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specific airline, but the entire industry), they will usually say
something about bad customer service or bad customer experience. If
you ask people what their perception of the US auto industry is
today, chances are the responses you get won’t be in line with what
the automakers project in their advertising.
So what’s a company to do if you can’t just buy your way into
building the brand you want?
What’s the best way to build a brand for the long term?
In a word: culture.
At Zappos, our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of
the other stuff—like great customer service, or building a great long-
term brand, or passionate employees and customers—will happen
naturally on its own.
We believe that your company’s culture and your company’s
brand are really just two sides of the same coin. The brand may lag
the culture at first, but eventually it will catch up.
Your culture is your brand.
So how do you build and maintain the culture that you want?
It starts with the hiring process. At Zappos, we actually do two
different sets of interviews. The hiring manager and his/her team will
do the standard set of interviews looking for relevant experience,
technical ability, fit within the team, etc. But then our HR department
does a separate set of interviews, looking purely for culture fit.
Candidates have to pass both sets of interviews in order to be hired.
We’ve actually said no to a lot of very talented people that we
know can make an immediate impact on our top or bottom line. But
because we felt they weren’t culture fits, we were willing to sacrifice
the short-term benefits in order to protect our culture (and therefore
our brand) for the long term.
After hiring, the next step to building the culture is training.
Everyone that is hired into our headquarters goes through the same
training that our Customer Loyalty Team (call center) reps go
through, regardless of department or title. You might be an
accountant, or a lawyer, or a software developer—you go through the
exact same training program.

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It’s a 4-week training program, in which we go over company
history, the importance of customer service, the long-term vision of
the company, our philosophy about company culture—and then
you’re actually on the phone for 2 weeks, taking calls from
customers. Again, this goes back to our belief that customer service
shouldn’t just be a department, it should be the entire company.
At the end of the first week of training, we make an offer to the
entire class. We offer everyone $2,000 to quit (in addition to paying
them for the time they’ve already worked), and it’s a standing offer
until the end of the fourth week of training. We want to make sure
that employees are here for more than just a paycheck. We want
employees that believe in our long-term vision and want to be a part
of our culture. As it turns out, on average, less than 1% of people end
up taking the offer.
One of the great advantages of focusing on culture is when
reporters come and visit our offices. Unlike most companies, we
don’t give reporters a small list of people they’re allowed to talk to.
Instead, we encourage them to wander around and talk to whoever
they want. It’s our way of being as transparent as possible, which is