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In another life, I was quite the marketing critic. As a teenager, even, I would mark up with a thick red pen the direct mail advertisements my family received in the mail and send them back to the advertiser with my notes and corrections.
Yeah, I was THAT girl.
Branding, especially, has always been a particularly interesting subject to me. How a company chooses to represent itself and position itself in the marketplace has always fascinated me. My poor husband and family have to listen to me rant and rave all the time about how Company A really dropped the ball on that campaign or how Company B let a golden branding opportunity slip through its fingers.
These rants are usually met with a glazed over look, or a slight snore….
But this Southwest Airlines -vs- Kevin Smith war has me intrigued. While I obviously side with @THATKevinSmith on this particular issue (disgruntled consumers, unite!) I find @Southwestair ‘s response baffling and fascinating all at the same time.
So, I share with you my official response to Southwest Airlines as I posted on their apparent, “justification and mea culpa” post on their website. It’s buried there among the high-fives for Southwest from people who can’t seem to accept that not everyone is a size 4 and the former customers who have sworn off Southwest for good. It’s in there, somewhere.
But I can’t let a good rant go bad….so, here ya go!
As a business owner and armchair critic of big business’ branding…wow, did you guys drop the ball on this one! Instead of becoming, “The Airline That Kicked Kevin Smith Off a Plane” you could have worked this entire thing to Southwest’s advantage by becoming the airline that caters to Customers of Size.
Shortsighted pride escalated this entire situation. Kevin Smith has over 1.6 MILLION followers on Twitter. His demographic of follower and movie audience is THE EXACT AUDIENCE a brand like Southwest wants in its pocket. Can you imagine if you had harnessed this power and turned this customer service debacle into an opportunity for Southwest?
What you SHOULD have done, was apologize profusely, issue an IMMEDIATE statement that Southwest has decided to aleviate the discomfort and embarassment that certain larger customers may experience on OTHER AIRLINES by implementing a strategy to incorporate two specific seats per aircraft that are 20% wider to accomodate Customers of Size.
THEN, you should have hammered home that plan with a witty ad campaign, won over Kevin Smith as an ambassador for your brand and then you could have possibly have even had a Kevin Smith cameo in your ads. Those ads would have been viral, no doubt, giving you hundreds of thousands of dollars of free advertising. Not to mention the goodwill and a loyal customer base among a fast-growing demographic of customers who are larger than the current seats.
In short, pride and Big Business Buffoonery let you miss a golden opportunity to capture yet ANOTHER loyal customer base that you can add to your “discount flyer base”. You could have blown the other airlines out of the water with this one. Instead, you turned a bad situation worse and missed an amazing and one-time branding opportunity.
Hope all the corporate red-tape and short-sighted customer service was worth it….
