Is It The Shoes?

On the afternoon of Feb. 16 – the opening day of the Pollstar Live! conference in Los Angeles – the North American Concert Promoters Association is sponsoring a unique presentation open to all registrants.

It’s ostensibly about Internet marketing but is actually no less than a call to revolutionize the way we conduct the concert business.

Tony Hsieh (pronounced “Shay”) is the CEO of Zappos.com, the No. 1 online source for shoes. Think about it: what product, other than cars, are we more accustomed to trying out before buying? That may be one reason why Zappos.com has a one-year return policy.

Hsieh’s presentation is “Delivering Happiness: Customer Service & Internet Marketing.” Both certainly apply to the concert business, which can never have enough suggestions on how to keep its customers satisfied and improve its online presence.

Since coming on board in 2000, Hsieh grew Zappos from $1.6 million gross annual sales to $1 billion. And if you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em – the company was recently acquired by Amazon.

Hsieh did it through creative approaches in marketing, human resources and especially customer service.

“I think of myself less as a leader and more of being almost an architect of an environment that enables employees to come up with their own ideas,” Hsieh recently told the New York Times, “and where employees can grow the culture and evolve it over time, so it’s not me having a vision of ‘This is our culture.’”

To that effect, Zappos.com provides a free employee lunch – not to be altruistic as much as to make sure the employees bond.

“Probably the most important thing I did was try to encourage employees to come up with their own ideas for building the culture,” Hsieh told the Times. “The actual ideas that I’ve personally come up with are few and far between.”

Before joining Zappos, Hsieh co-founded Venture Frogs, a venture capital firm that invested in companies such as Zappos, Ask Jeeves and MongoMusic. He also co-founded LinkExchange, growing it from his apartment to a company that was acquired by Microsoft for $265 million in 1996.