Branding Lessons From the Friendly Skies of United
In 1965, ad man extraordinaire Leo Burnett came up with an iconic tagline for United Airlines—“Fly the Friendly Skies of United.” Boomers and even some GenXers will remember the significant brand equity that resulted from this well-crafted phrase, which endured until it was retired by United in 1996. The tagline had worked so well that it was even brought out of retirement a few years ago, freshened up a bit, and put right back into service.
And then this thing happened.
Everyone by now has heard about and probably seen images of a paying customer being forcefully removed from a United Airlines flight, suffering a multiple, bloody injuries and a concussion in the process.
This draconian approach to removing an uncooperative passenger created a firestorm of anger combined with a general sense of disgust. Regardless of how United spins it, the image that is seared into the collective psyche of the marketplace is of a bloodied passenger being dragged off of a United plane. This is now part of United’s reputation in the marketplace, which means it’s now part of the United brand.
In fact, that’s what a brand really is—the reputation of your company. Your brand is how you are perceived in the marketplace.
Some people aren’t exactly clear on that. For example, I was recently asked by a client to evaluate her brand. When I agreed, she proceeded to show me a logo that a designer had just created for her.
It was an interesting piece of graphic design, well rendered and obviously professionally done. In other words, it looked great.
But it had absolutely nothing to do with her brand.
First of all, a logo is not a brand. A logo is a graphical mark that is a part of a brand identity. A well-executed logo represents the brand. But it is not the brand.
A brand identity contains multiple elements that are used together to tell the brand story. A brand identity includes graphic components and an integrated message model that—when done right—all work together to shape the brand image. Just as a photo of you represents you but is not really you, a brand identity, including the logo, helps a person to form an association with your brand. But it is not the brand itself.
A brand is really the reputation that a business develops in the marketplace. The substance of a brand is how the company provides value – or fails to provide value – to its customers.
What people feel about a business ultimately defines how a brand is perceived. Because of this, the only way that a brand becomes a brand is through operational history, customer experience, and possibly the perception of the general public, depending on the publicity the brand receives, if any. A powerful brand isn’t built so much as it is earned. The same applies to a weak one as well.
The debacle that played out on that United airplane demonstrates very clearly how a brand is shaped in and by the marketplace.
If you want to build and grow a powerful and lucrative brand, it must be carefully managed. Accordingly, to properly manage your brand, you must manage your business. Here are 5 things I see as critical to managing and growing your brand. To illustrate, I’m going to frame my suggestions within the context of the United debacle.
- Deliver Value
I define a sale as the process of creating an equal exchange of value. A bran—to a large degree is based on these exchanges. At the heart of every business transaction, you will always find a fundamental value exchange. Clearly, some businesses deliver more value than others. In the case of United, the basic value exchange is reasonably safe, comfortable, reliable air transportation in return for a cash payment. Their brand—at least to this point—starts with this value exchange. As such, the United brand is obviously associated with air travel and up until now was regarded as a viable choice in public airlines. This allowed the company to become the world’s third largest airline with total revenue of $36.5 billion.
- Solve Problems
Companies with robust brands are known for solving problems—both for their customers and for their business. For example, if I’m a customer, my problem might be how to get from point A to point B, and I might decide that flying on United solves that problem. To succeed, however, a company must also effectively and efficiently solve the myriad of operational problems that arise every day in the normal course of business. In the case of the United debacle, a problem arose when employees needed to be transported on company business. The company decided that the best solution was to evict four paying passengers from the plane so that the employees could get where they needed to go. In retrospect, this was neither an effective nor an efficient solution to the problem. Supposedly solving a business problem not only wound up creating a bigger problem for customers but it also created another, massive mushroom cloud of a problem for the business as well.
- Respect Customers
As I mentioned before, your brand is your reputation. The way your customers think about you will largely determine how your brand is perceived and recognized in the marketplace. According to the fine print on the ticket, United did indeed have the right to “bump” passengers. It was ultimately the draconian way that they exercised the right that became the problem. Granted, the passenger apparently became belligerent when asked to disembark. Anyone who has ever worked in any service industry has probably faced something similar. But nobody on the plane was being threatened or in any sort of physical danger. So a better approach would have been to respect not only the unruly passenger but everyone else on the flight as well, and to come up with another, better solution, even if it meant that United would have to buy its way out of the problem. Which by the way would have been far less expensive than what they’re faced with now.
- Operate Consistently
In building a brand, customers establish a set of expectations regarding how a company does business. A company that consistently provides spectacular customer service will be recognized accordingly. Conversely, a company that provides horrible service will become known for that as well. For better or worse, these perceptions become elements of the brand. (Walmart offers a different level of service than your local Wholefoods, for example.) Having someone physically removed from an aircraft is clearly not United’s typical procedure for dealing with an overbooked aircraft. It was an operational inconsistency. United started by offering money to people for voluntarily disembarking. They arbitrarily chose, however, to offer no more than $1000 for this inconvenience. The inconsistency in United’s approach occurred when they resorted to institutional violence in order to remove the passenger. The resulting fallout from this debacle will wind up costing United much more than they would have paid had they kept raising the reward for disembarking.
- Plan Carefully
From the highest level of strategic planning to the most routine aspect of tactical execution, a business must plan carefully and meticulously. In the case of United, when they chose to call the police and have customers forcibly removed from their airplane, they demonstrated a clear lack of planning at both the strategic and tactical level. Recalcitrant customers will be a part of any company’s operation at some point. Having an effective strategy in place to deal with this type of problem is important. Training staff in the proper way to handle such a problem is also important. The fact that the company was unable to plan and execute an acceptable solution clearly demonstrates the point that planning is a critical aspect of brand management. Whatever the United planning calculus included, they clearly got it wrong, somewhere along the way.
Building a brand is like building a brick wall—it’s done one little piece at a time. And if it’s done right, it’s rock solid. Ultimately, a brand is the cumulative effect of a company’s day-to-day operations and decisions as much as it is its products, services, and approach to customers. And like a brick wall—regardless of how much time, effort, and energy went into building the brand—if the wall is breached and starts to crumble, it will all come tumbling down.
In the aftermath of the United debacle, the company is still picking up the pieces. By trying to save some money while transporting employees, they have now wound up refunding the money for all the tickets for everybody on the flight, they have lost millions of dollars of stock value, and they are now facing a significant legal action that will cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars—at least—as well.
Ultimately, however, the biggest loss to United is the brand equity that went up in smoke as the glare of public attention and derogatory public sentiment is focused on the company. All of the crisis management firms, PR agencies, spin doctors, and the entire executive team of United can’t change what happened or do much to alter the way the public has interpreted it. The brand has been indelibly tarnished, and that damage will take a very long time to repair. A brand is built over time by customers, satisfied or not, one value transaction at a time.
A solid, valuable brand is difficult to build, and unfortunately very easy to destroy. Manage yours carefully.
