[tubemonkey]

Why Amazon's plan to build a second headquarters could be a 'marketing ploy'

Amazon's plans to build a second North American headquarters, announced on Thursday, is highly unusual, even for a company this big, and could be more of a "marketing ploy," some academics said.

"I think the name 'headquarters' is a little bit of a marketing ploy. I mean they just want to have a big office in another city," Felipe Caro, a professor at UCLA's school of management, told CNBC.

Caro said cities and states are willing to do anything to attract tech companies these days because they create lots of new jobs and could spur other companies to open shop as well, boosting the region's overall economy. In return, companies are given outsize benefits, mostly in the form of tax breaks, but their economic impact far outweighs the loss in taxes, he said.

"It's not only uncommon, it's almost unheard of," Useem said of Amazon's plan to open a second headquarters. "It's symptomatic of how Jeff Bezos kind of breaks all the rules along the way: Why not build a second headquarters and see how it works out?"

But if there's any company who's able to pull it off, it has to be Amazon, Caro said. Amazon's corporate culture of keeping different business units almost run like independent companies could make it relatively easy to run two massive headquarters separately.