Over the past few weeks, Southwest Airlines announced that it will be moving away from boarding groups and instead assigning seats to customers so that it may offer premium seating in an effort to improve financial performance and to evolve the customer experience. Citing customer and market research, Southwest has indicated that this move to assigned seats are what customers want; for those who choose other airlines, open seating is the reason they give for NOT selecting Southwest. While I’m sure the research supports such a decision on behalf of Southwest, I can’t help but wonder how some of their most loyal travelers will react. Why?
Because this change makes Southwest look more like everyone else.
As someone who studies the ways customers develop intense loyalty for brands, this decision has left me wondering what the impact could be on those customers who are fervently loyal to the airline, like me. To better understand what the impact could be, one needs to consider the deep-rooted loyalty that’s at stake for some of their best members. Three different principles come to mind:
- Identification
- Mastery, Autonomy, and Intrinsic Motivation
- Emotional Loyalty Drivers
We can explore each of those in turn as a means to highlight how Southwest’s loyal customers could perceive this change in the future.
I Fly Southwest, Therefore I Am
When Southwest hit its stride, they took the market by storm. One of the keys to their success, aside from their operational efficiencies, was the fact that they were so different. They bucked the system. They weren’t like other airlines. They democratized travel. Some might say they were rebels. For a lot of travelers, the rebellious nature of Southwest attracted them to the brand. They saw that aspect of their brand as congruent with who they either were or aspired to be and identified strongly with it. In short, being a Southwest customer became part of who they are. And when a customer identifies with either a real or perceived community, their loyalty runs deep. One of the ways that loyalty is exhibited is by learning the ways of that community, like how to navigate something like open seating.
Now, if you’re a loyal Southwest customer, you probably have a story where you maybe needed to explain to a newbie how the system works. You probably have a defined strategy regarding how to keep that middle seat open on a less-than-full flight. Make yourself appear larger than you are. Be engrossed in whatever you brought that you can be engrossed in. Don’t make eye contact. Rest something on the seat until the last possible minute. You maybe refuse to fasten your seat buckle because you’re afraid you’ll jinx it. And, if it’s a completely full flight, you get strategic about who you make eye contact with, or who you might invite to sit next to you that optimizes the space.
What one may not realize is that those strategies are way more than just strategies. They’re communal knowledge. You could argue that they even border on ritual. In this case, knowledge of how Southwest does seating automatically creates an in-group (those in the know) and an out-group (everyone else) and with that, an even stronger bond to the brand.
Mastery, Autonomy, and Motivation
There’s another thing that having that communal knowledge does for the psyche and our motivation to be loyal. It gives us a sense of mastery and autonomy, two of the pillars of intrinsic motivation (along with purpose and social connection). Knowing how the boarding process works and how it’s different than other boarding processes provides us with a sense that we’ve mastered the Southwest experience. That pushes us further towards the more intrinsic end of the motivation spectrum when it comes to our loyalty which means we’re loyal because of way more than just a reward. Choosing your seat also gives those in-the-know a sense of autonomy. We can choose (if we do it right) wherever we want to sit on the airplane, right in that moment. For those outside the community, autonomy may not apply, but it only takes one experience where you fail at mastery and autonomy before you figure out the process moving forward.
Emotional Loyalty Drivers
At Kobie, emotional loyalty runs through our veins. So, when I heard about this change from Southwest, I also immediately thought about how those driven by one of our three proprietary ELS™ drivers – Habit, Status, and Reciprocity – might react, and openly wondered whether Southwest thought about what’s driving their loyal members to be loyal on a deeper level.
For those Habit-motivated individuals whose emotional loyalty hinges on taking comfort in the convenient and the familiar, this change will absolutely fall flat. Habit motivated loyalists are driven by knowing what to expect from an experience. They’re often fairly passive in their loyalty, on auto-pilot. They find peace in ritual and repetition. That is, until something changes, at which point they’ll be left questioning that very loyalty in the first place. Deviate too far from what they’re used to, and they can sour on your brand all together.
Status-motivated consumers are all about feeling special and exclusive. Their deeper, more emotional loyalty is tied to brands that make them feel like they’re the only customer in the world. While this change Southwest is making could provide some operational levers for making their most loyal feel special (with premium seats, come the option for premium upgrades), it could also hinder the feeling of exclusivity certain members feel, namely those with status in Southwest’s loyalty program. Qualifying for that status can be a big deal. Many members work for it with some even taking flights to a random city at the end of the year just to re-qualify (sample size of one here – it was good to see you Kansas City). The name of their tiers is tied to their open seating policy – A List and A List Preferred. And one of the biggest perks is seeing that A on your boarding pass when you check in or are auto-checked in for the flight. All of that will have to go away with this new change and Southwest will need to substantially evolve its loyalty program as well it they don’t want to risk the loyalty of those members driven by Status.
Finally, those customers motivated to be emotionally loyal by Reciprocity are all about the relational exchanges they have with a brand so long as those exchanges are perceived as equitable and fair. Here is where there may be some upside for Southwest. If they can evolve the experience to be better, then those relational exchanges will come and Reciprocity-motivated members will respond in kind. But, the experience can’t be perceived as getting worse and members must not perceive this move by Southwest to be more motivated by profit more than anything. Reciprocity-motivated customers will feel the pain of those scenarios more deeply than other members and they’ll almost see it as a betrayal of the relationship they have with Southwest.
The Only Thing that Stays the Same is Change
Businesses must change. Market conditions can be fickle and often dictate or force a brand’s evolutionary process forward. In the case of Southwest, that means cutting a feature of their airline that has long been a differentiator for them tied to their brand. While the research Southwest has conducted indicates that the time is now to make this change, I wonder whether Southwest has thought of the emotional loyalty that’s linked to one of the ways their biggest and most loyal customers experience Southwest. Aspects of a brand’s experience, particularly for those customers that are in-the-know, take on a whole deeper meaning when it comes to the emotional loyalty those members feel. Only time will tell if those customers will still feel the LUV.
Written By: Dr. JR Slubowski
Dr. JR Slubowski, Kobie’s Associate VP of Strategic Consulting focuses on creating engaging data-driven experiences for brands that customers love. His commitment to craft critical thought-out strategies allows him to perform complex customer analytics and to drive results with relevant data. He specializes in customer analytics, marketing communications and strategic planning.
