Hey you!

It’s been a very long time since I wrote my last post..I don’t know whether it’s a coincidence, or not, but since I changed the name of my blog to “Everything, Anything” , it became a lot more difficult to write something . I guess I should have been more specific..

What I’ve done..What have changed in my life..Not so many things..Just changed a country, a city, a job, friends and anything that I used to..that’s all..(=

I left the US and moved back to Turkey, but to “Istanbul” this time with a new job..I was trying to find one in the United States, but I wasn’t so lucky..My luck started with my entrance to the US..It was September 16 when I entered to the US and Lehman Brothers cited a bank debt of $613 billion..But I didn’t lose my hope and had one of the best years in my life in Santa Barbara..it was all perfect living in somewhere you can reach the ocean in 5 minutes..

My certification program was also one of the best choices I’ve ever made in my life..I learned lot of lots of things in the marketing certification program (me at pg 6 =)) with all the perfect instructors, program curriculum, projects that helped me to find out that how much I love creating ideas..And gained lots of friends (Alexi & Anja♡)..

After completing the program, I had about 3-4 months for looking for a job, but I was able to use only 1 month because of personal reasons (may be this is the thing called fate)..I was interviewed with Google and Zappos(♡ the company of my dreams). These both didn’t go well. (Zappos – I haven’t given up yet =))

This is now all I have from the United States =)



And in a way, I’m here in Turkey again..Working..and trying to get used to my new life..

I was supposed to be working in the US according to my plans while leaving Ankara, but I found myself changing cities and even countries..Life’s changing & time’s passing so quickly without you even notice..And I don’t really have any clue what’s going to be next..The only thing I know that there are so many things that I want to do and I haven’t actually started doing them..I’m still trying to figure out myself and have the best that I can, live the best I can..I’m happy as who I am and I’m trying to create fine moments in my life that is going to help to sustain and power this happiness..that’s the aim of my life..If you want to join, you’re always welcome =)

I think the presentation below about delivering happiness that Tony Hsieh (Zappos CEO) prepared as a present to little Ava(11) to teach a few important things about life probably summarizes most of the things I’ve tried to say..

Ava 11th Birthday - Delivering Happiness

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See you soon...

Zappos & Amazon sitting in a tree =)

I’ve been feeling so excited, happy and curious at the same time since I got the news about Amazon and Zappos. I think I don’t need to tell my feelings about Zappos from the beginning now, but they’re special for me, you know that.

Now Amazon joined the party, too. And now what? I first had the news as “Amazon Acquires Zappos for bla bla” , and there are also a million news as “Amazon buys Zappos”, but it’s actually not exactly like that.

I’m sure that anyone who knows a few things about Zappos also knows that the thing that creates the “Zappos thing” is their culture, values, the people who were chosen carefully to be a perfect fit to Zappos team and it’s not so easy to acquire all of those by a specific amount of money.

As Tony says in his letter today “I personally would prefer the headline “Zappos and Amazon sitting in a tree…””. And yep, let’s say so. Because when we say so, we’d also mention one of the most powerful partnerships and then it fits the spirit of the transaction more.

I’m sure it’d be perfect for both of these companies that I adore.

They both think about their customers, they both make us want to shop like crazy, and they’re both good at building relationships with us, customers and making us happy in a way. Only their styles differ in these processes.

As Tony also mentioned, Amazon makes us happy with low prices, variety of goods, and convenience in a lot of ways while Zappos makes us happy by developing sincere relationships, friendly connections and WOWing us all the time.

So I’m excited and happy about the future of the shopping with these companies. It’s so peaceful to know that both of these companies are going to do their bests for us, therefore the only thing to do for us is to enjoy it.

And I’m really curious about what are these companies going to learn from each other and how is it going to reflect to us exactly?

Zappos & Amazon! WOW!

What do you think?

My Culture, Your Culture, Our Culture..

Zappos Core Values by Me

I came to United States about 9 months ago and yep I changed a lot, but it’s impossible to replace all the past years’ experiences with these 9 months' .

There are about 7 billion people in the world who are all different from the each other; we think differently, feel differently, talk differently, live differently, etc. Although we have nearly similar problems, we have different solutions. But, when we look closer we see that some communities have similar solutions or we can at least group some of the people based on some similarities. We can group people according to their nationalities, according to their gender, and according to their jobs. So, what can we call this thing that connects some people, makes them understand others? It is like a secret agreement among the people in a community that helps them to stay together in peace and to create a unity. Yes, our word is CULTURE.

May be we all born with some characteristics, but as we grow, we learn a lot of things from our environment. We learn how to think, how to speak, how to behave and even how to feel. We start being programmed slowly with all these data. When we want to make some changes in our program after a few years, we need to reach main code of our program to make a permanent change, which is not so possible. But one thing we can do is to add some new properties to our program and use the convenient ones in the convenient times.

So culture makes us connected, helps us to understand each other and to generate common solutions, constitutes the feeling of unity, and as a result creates a society that has the same interests.

While there is the culture for a country that creates the feeling of homesickness, another one is the company culture which makes a substantial company and differentiates it from the others.

Zappos is the company that introduced me the concept of company culture. After observing their efforts on creating their core values and keeping them alive, I started to think the importance of having a specific company culture. And it didn’t take me so long to understand its importance after I started following Zappos blog, following Tony and other Zapponians on Twitter, and reading Zappos Culture book. Everyone is working so hard just to present their culture and core values in a lot of different ways, and they are really good at this. As they always do, they again create another brilliant idea to pull us to more inside of Zappos with their 2 day Bootcamp which is to express themselves in a different way. And I found myself again trying to meet these people, to be a closer witness to their success. May be this is my lucky day..

Starbucks: Delivering Customer Service

A few weeks ago I read a case study of Harvard Business School about Starbucks (Starbucks: Delivering Customer Service). It was generally about the expansion of Starbucks and the results. Starbucks has always been one of the companies that really impress me with the importance they give to customer service. So I want to share my views about this study with you.

I think this case study is trying to tell us two things.

First of all, regardless of how big and how good our company is, we should be careful about company expansion because it is a hard thing to maintain the same environment and culture in each branch. It is also stated in the book ‘Discovering the Soul of Service’ as “Maintaining effective internal company communications, reinforcing the company’s vision and culture, and delivering consistently high quality service – essential success factors – are challenged by expansion.”

Second idea is we should never see a customer oriented investment as an expense. In my interview with Zappos, they also told me that they are doing anything to give a good service to the customers without thinking about the expenses. This may be harmful for them in the short-run, but they are never concerned about the short-term outcomes; what they are interested in are the long-term advantages.

After this case study I started to think that expansion or being everywhere are not the main indicators of success. We should first realize a pace in the existing branches and after that we should think about an expansion. Because the important thing is to have the same culture, same environment in each branch and the main aim of the expansion should be reinforcing the company’s vision.

Another thing that attracted my attention is the process between being a barista and then a manager. It is said in the study that 70% of the company’s store managers were ex-baristas and about 60% of the district managers were ex-store managers. I think this is not only good for motivating the baristas, but also it is a good technique to have the managers understand the importance of customer service. Again for this situation, Zappos is an example of this application; all the new employees are working four weeks in the call center and one week in the warehouse to understand the importance of the customer service. 

I noticed that most of the successful companies have a common aim, customer satisfaction. To sum up, a company should never forget the most important thing is the satisfaction of the customers and they should always be careful about the customer satisfaction gap and service gap and they should not let these gaps grow.  Therefore I think that, giving importance to customer service and company culture, and employee satisfaction are significant steps in the way of success of a company. 

 

Zappos Presentation Tomorrow

I also prepared my slides for tomorrow's presentation for the Zappos interview! I'll present this to my Marketing: When Product is a Service Class. Hope I can have them understand Zappos sell a lot more than shoes! So wish me luck..

Zappos Interview Presentation

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My Zappos interview & report

I just finished my report [http://www.box.net/shared/8ynpfx3krt] that I was writing for a class project. But it was more than a class project for me since it was about Zappos.com. This was one of the rare moments that a person can get so excited about a homework..I was so happy because I finally found a chance for learning something about their success story from someone inside..I made an interview with Aaron Magness who oversees the PR department at Zappos and finally wrote this report by using his answers and some other sources. 

I want to thank also Tony Hsieh for replying all my tweets and helping me to conduct this interview. As soon as I sent a message to him through Twitter, he told me that I can send the questions to him and asked Aaron Magness to help me with the questions.  They were all so helpfull and kind.  

I really don't have any idea how Tony can find time for everything, but I'm glad he is doing so.

Thank you Aaron Magness, Tony Hsieh, Zappos..

Link for the report: http://www.box.net/shared/8ynpfx3krt

Table of Contents

1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 

2. ZAPPOS (Powered by Service) 

a. EMPLOYEES 

b. ZAPPOS CULTURE 

3. SERVICES & KEY SERVICES 

a. A WOW experience memory 

4. CUSTOMERS 

5. BUSINESS EXPANSION 

6. COMPETITORS

7. ADVERTISEMENT & MARKETING

8. ANALYSIS & RECOMMENDATIONS 

9. REFERENCES 

a. Pictures are taken from