Southwest: Marketing Before and During a Global Pandemic

An Airline for the People

Southwest is one of the United States’ most well-known airlines and has an overwhelmingly positive reputation with most travelers. A Chicago Business journal article discusses some of the reasons why Southwest has such high “brand intimacy,” which is the emotional attachment that customers hold with the brand. In addition to good prices and deals, Southwest employs several tactics to maintain strong, lasting relationships with its customers.

Establishing Trust and Offering Value

Many airlines are seen as untrustworthy. Southwest’s challenge is to skirt the line between reasonable prices and prices that seem too cheap to garner high-quality service. Southwest gains consumers’ trust by offering them benefits that are universally sought, like two free checked bags with every flight, and frequent flyer points that allow consumers to save up for a free flight in the future. Ultimately, the airline communicates to the customer that it is more transparent and honest than other airlines. Southwest ensures that consumers are getting the most updated and accurate information available, which earns the brand significant consumer trust.

Brand Ethos

Another one of Southwest’s keys to success is its strong emotional positioning. The brand prioritizes customer service by providing free drinks on the flight, and the crew even sometimes sings songs and plays games with the passengers to engage with them and make them feel at home with the ”Southwest family.” This playfulness, along with advertisements featuring flight attendants themselves, helps to humanize the brand and differentiate Southwest from the value provided by other airlines.

Marketing During a Pandemic

One of the industries affected most by the pandemic has been the airline industry. As of April, 2020, somewhere between 40% and a whopping 90% of air travel was reduced or suspended. Every airline has approached the crisis differently, but Southwest has made sure to stick to its core values when deciding what precautions to take and how to convince their customers that it is safe to fly. Although the airline cut out middle seat tickets to improve safety and social distancing, Southwest did not cut down on capacity as much as some other major airlines such as Delta did. This allowed Southwest to increase market share domestically and compete with the other major U.S. players.

While other airlines have been cutting back on marketing, Southwest has gone all-in, releasing two major campaigns since the onset of the pandemic. With the knowledge that leisure travel decreased in the first several months of the pandemic, Southwest shifted their focus towards business travelers, using its marketing resources to reassure these these travelers that if they have to travel, Southwest is the best and safest way to do so.

As the year has gone on and travel numbers have slowly restored, Southwest began targeting families again with their lighthearted “Wanna Get Away” campaign. This campaign played off of the creative solutions families have taken to reduce boredom while stuck in the house, and offers a solution of its own: a Southwest get away. This technique communicates to the average parent that Southwest understands how tiring and boring quarantine can be and seeks to offer them a safe, cost-effective solution to get out of their bubble.