Reaction 1 on Zappos

2023123307 서가은(Gaeun Seo)

After reading Zappos case, I found some interesting fact about it. Even though it is a
shoemaking company, the case rarely mentions about shoes; the quality, the design, and all the
other factors necessary for making shoes are omitted. That is, the success of Zappos is not
because of their main product. Rather, its desirable company goals made consumers fascinated.
However, there are a lot of companies that pursue social goals and not all of them succeed. Then
we might question “Why do Zappos succeed and others don’t?” I could find the answer to this
question by comparing Zappos with Toms.

Zappos and Toms

TOMS is also a company selling shoes. It has a rule called ‘One for one’ which donates shoes
every time their shoes are sold. Its rule moved consumer’s minds for a while, but it eventually
suffered from financial problems. Zappos and Toms are quite similar in many ways. Both sell
shoes, and they have great social goals. However, they ended up with opposite results. The
difference lies on “consumer demand”. Though it’s not directly related to shoes, the core value of
Zappos(Spreading happiness) is reasonable and desirable for consumers because everyone wants
to be happy. The core value of Toms is also great, but we cannot say it’s sustainable for one
consumer. There are many ways to donate or provide help to others without TOMS. People can
buy it once with curiosity and with a charitable mind, but they will soon lose their motivation to
buy TOMS again if there is no differentiation with other shoe companies. “Desirable goals” are not
enough to construct a sustainable demand structure. The companies should capture what the
consumer wants and reflect it in their core value.

A pioneer of deindustrialization
One more interesting thing about Zappos is that it works as a pioneer of changes from
industrialized to deindustrialized society. We can find three deindustrialized traits from Zappos.
1. To create a company culture
The dictionary definition of culture is to have its own ways of life. Therefore, creating a
company culture means that they are treating company as an entity that has a personality.
Compared with factory, a company with identity has some advantages. First, it has a vision itself
so it can act flexibly and survive under rapid societal changes. Also, it can make people feel more
friendly to company. This is what Zappos wanted so they made their own culture and let
everyone on the outside access to their culture or company rules.
2. To see time as an asset
Zappos doesn’t care how long it takes to make consumers happy. They only care about
whether they really made their consumers happy. This shows a start contrast with companies in
industrial society. At then, company only focused on “efficiency”, which brings them the maximum
result with the minimum time and resources. Efficiency is definitely important for company, but
such a diversified society in nowadays requires more than that. Companies need “effectiveness” so
that they could inspect whether they are on the right path. Zappos are using their asset called
‘time’ to
3. To distinguish “controllable things” and “uncontrollable things”
For centuries, companies have tried to control many things. The most representative example of
this would be their reputation. Companies have tried to make their image better, and sometimes
attempted to manipulate their reputation in various ways. However, in 21st century, we can’t
control company reputation anymore since people can communicate worldwide through SNS.
Zappos recognized this fact and stopped putting energy into uncontrollable things. Instead, they
accepted their reputation and put their energy into improving their defect.