There’s something going around social right now that’s really bugging me. Maybe you’ve seen the headline: buy a Southwest flight in the next few days and get Companion Pass.
That sounds like a really good deal. It got me and my wife excited. I saw plenty of other people sharing it in their stories.
I used to be a huge Southwest fan. There was one year I flew Southwest thirty-six weeks out of the year. (Don’t do that. It’s too much travel.) I loved the humor, loved the brand, loved what they stood for. Flying out of Love Field here in Dallas was great. My wife Rachel and I had Companion Pass for a while when I was traveling a lot, and it was legitimately great. Normally it’s good for up to twenty-four months: the rest of the calendar year you qualify in, plus the whole next year, and on every flight you buy, you add another person for free.
So I was excited. Maybe we get plugged back in with Southwest. I’ve missed that experience. They haven’t been competitive on price or much else for a while.
Here’s what sucks about it. You click past the headline and realize the Companion Pass you qualify for isn’t the normal Companion Pass at all. It’s only good from about January 5 to March 3 of next year. January and February are by far the least-traveled months on most any airline, and especially on Southwest.
Some joker in a conference room looked at the numbers and said: we need cash right now, so we want people buying flights in the next few days. We also have nobody booking in these two months, and those planes are nowhere near full. What can we do? We’ll offer a Companion Pass, which requires you to buy a ticket, and we’ll give away something that costs us nothing, an open seat on a flight that’s already empty, and we’ll treat it like a big win for you, our customer.
This is the difference between building a brand and running marketing and sales.
When your marketing and sales tactics are shortcut tactics that bring in cash, get engagement, and get shared on social, they look great on a spreadsheet for a few days. You might get some extra flights booked now and a few more in January and February. Someone can call that a win.
What they’re actually doing is breaking their brand. They’re wrecking trust they took decades to build. Somebody in that room needed to say: this is a terrible idea, because it’s the very thing that ruins the brand. Sure, we get a spike this week and a spike in those two months. And we break trust. People stop booking with us. This is bad for the business.
Both things matter. Marketing and sales strategies and tactics absolutely matter. But you cannot run them to make one chart look good, even when your job’s on the line, if it’s going to break the brand and ruin the business long-term.
If you’re a founder or a leader, this is a tension you live in: how do I build a brand and also get results right now? That tension is real, and we all have to live in it. This is the wrong way to walk it. Someone in charge has to be the champion of holding it so the brand stays one people trust. If you’re the founder, the entrepreneur, the principal leader, that person is usually you.
So take this as a vote of confidence, and as an example to carry forward: value and prioritize building your brand, real relationships, and real trust with your customers over shortcut tactics.
— Craig