Creating a Brand People Love

Learning from others who have already gone down the beaten path can be super beneficial for those looking to join successful entrepreneurs and hopefully learn from their mistakes and gain valuable business knowledge. The Stanford business school does a great job of uploading lectures from successful entrepreneurs speaking in their school and you don’t have to pay $50,000 in tuition. This truly is a deal.

3 of 10 great videos from the Stanford business school. Stay tuned and subscribe for further updates.

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Creating a Brand People Love

In what has to be one of the funniest introductions on the entire Stanford channel, Tony Hsieh from Zappos details a story of an executive who came to visit him at Zappos HQ, only to sit down with a Zappos loyalty rep and find out that his wife had spent $62,000 with the company!

Hsieh continues the rest of this great talk outlining why, for him, building a brand people care about is one of the most exciting things in business, as well as the key decisions he made at Zappos that helped him do just that.

One of the most interesting pieces to me was the objective of their call center. Hsieh argues that they encouraged customers to call them, even though most calls did not result in sales. The reason? Spending five minutes with a customer allowed them to deliver “frugal wows” that built more goodwill than random, spray-and-pray advertising.

So our whole philosophy is let’s take most of the money that we would have spent on paid advertising or paid marketing, and rather than “buy” our exposure, instead, let’s invest it into our customer service and the customer experience—and let our customers do our marketing for us, through word of mouth.

On any given day about 75% of our orders are from repeat customers, and we basically grew from no sales in 1999 to, in 2008, which was the first year where we hit a billion dollars in gross merchandise sales.

[via Helpscout]

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