Strategic positioning and planning is a very important aspect of growing a business. Having the entire organization aware of that strategy so that everyone is on board and working towards the same vision, mission and goals is the key to achieving the goals of that strategy. In my opinion Zappos has done a good job in many areas of their strategic planning; they have used their balanced scorecard approach to strategically align themselves in an advantageous position in line with Porter’s Five Forces theory. They were the first to offer their products in the differentiated approach that they have taken, “A Service Company that sells shoes.” Their main goal is to “WOW the customer” and all others that they happen to have relationships with, including suppliers and everyone else in their supply chain, by providing excellent service. Their Competitive Advantage is their company culture and core company values. Employee satisfaction and enthusiasm is key to their culture and they go above and beyond to ensure that taking care of their employees, and making sure that a fun, family atmosphere is maintained in order to have happy employees, with freedom and autonomy, to then be able to ensure that they will in turn make happy customers. They have made suppliers their allies instead of thinking of them as the competition. They have vertically aligned themselves with other websites to alleviate some of the worry of competition as well as positioned themselves to offer their “powered by Zappos” service in order to work with competitors and gain revenue from them. Below I have listed Zappos’ key success factors, as at 2008. The accompanying map of strengths, categorized into the 4 perspectives of the Balanced Scorecard shows how the company culture and all that is involved with it, drives the customer satisfaction levels. The internal processes of business