Foreword

A brand is not just a logo, an advertising slogan, a product, a service, a building, an airplane, great leadership, or profitability. A brand is all of these. It is the fabric of the organization woven together purposefully over a period of time. And it doesn’t just happen, as Janelle Barlow and Paul Stewart so eloquently point out.

I had the opportunity to be the second CEO of Southwest Airlines when it was a fledgling company serving destinations in Texas. My role was to position the company with solid people, products, and a financial foundation for future growth with deregulation about to be enacted. One of my first priorities was to engage our senior management team in a visioning process. It was a small team of nine, including Chairman Herb Kelleher.

We went off-site to a conference room at a local university in Dallas, Texas, and I facilitated the session. The objective was to agree on a direction and pathway and distill down to a hundred words or less what we were going to be when we grew up. After ten hours of spirited discussion, we were all drained mentally and took the evening off for a cookout at my home. The following morning we started refreshed, and within an hour it became clear to all of us. We were not an airline.

We were in mass transportation, a totally different business, a different model, a different brand. We could create new fliers and markets with low costs, low fares, frequent service, and great people, competing with the automobile, the bus, and the living room—not other airlines.

We then wrote a mission/vision statement that was only fifty-two words long and easily understood by all our stakeholders. Taking the next step—developing a culture to support the brand—required spending a lot of time the following year spreading that gospel, oneon-one, one-on-two, wherever we could find an audience.

You don’t take a commodity, an airline seat, and turn it into a recognizable brand unless all of your teammates buy into and benefit from the proposition. Southwest has always believed in “hiring attitudes and teaching skills” and sharing the profits with all employees. We believed that if we treated our people as number one, they would treat our customers the same way. As two advertising executives from New York, Simon and Gromes, once said to me: “If you just sell a product or a service you will probably be known as a vendor or supplier. If you sell a vision or experience you will begin to develop a brand.”

It has worked successfully as Southwest has been profitable every year for nearly thirty years, a record unmatched in a turbulent industry. If you are serious about building great enduring connections between your customers and the brand you represent, then Branded Customer Service will provide you both the road map and the toolkit you need to become an on-brand organization and create the success Southwest Airlines, a brand pioneering company, has enjoyed.

Howard Putnam

Former CEO of Southwest Airlines