This past weekend I ran across a historical display for Southwest Airlines in a Dallas Museum. The promotional materials and “LUV Potions” cocktail menu from the 1971 launch look amusingly dated, but the planes themselves are a dead ringer for the 737 I flew home the next

The first Southwest Airlines plane.

day—same design pattern, same color scheme. They’re fulfilling one of David Ogilvy’s key tests for a good concept: will it last for 30 years?

It got me thinking about what a consistent brand Southwest has been over the years—not just in design but in its irreverent voice that pokes fun at itself, the flying experience, and especially mandatory FAA announcements. (My favorite example of this humorous approach was the air sickness bag with a recruiting message on it: “sick of your job?”) This is heavy lifting from the marketing department and a key reason people who don’t generally “like” airlines go out of their way to fly Southwest.

Interestingly, Southwest itself has itself gotten a little tired of its consistency recently and is moving things around. Its website was recently redesigned with a color scheme that is a reasonable evolution from its beginnings, but with broad horizontal elements and an anonymous san serif type face that remind me on one of those sites you wind up on by mistake where somebody is squatting on a URL and wants to make it look like a “real” website with links and search.

Advice to Southwest: don’t get bored with success. Remember Henry Ford’s alleged complaint to his marketing director: “I like that campaign of yours but does it have to appear so dang often?” To which the marketing director replied, “Mr. Ford, the campaign has yet to appear in print!” Continue reading →

I’ve always followed David Ogilvy’s dictum, which means I never show work around if I know was not successful in the marketplace. But what if the market was wrong? Or, to put it less arrogantly, what if the lists got messed up somehow and my mailer or email went to the wrong folks? Shouldn’t you be allowed a free pass once every few decades on work YOU really like and think is good?

I was going to present the piece shown here as an example. It’s always been one of my personal favorites, though I hadn’t looked at it in a number of years. The client and I were very surprised at the time that it was not a big winner. But when I pulled it out today, I could immediately see what was wrong.

The outer envelope (upper right in the photo) is what kills this package. We’re selling a book of relaxing natural cures to women and I wanted to use a lemon to illustrate how our mind has powers to help us. (Really concentrate, think about a lemon and its taste, and your mouth starts to pucker up.) But where’s the reader benefit in this? I was also betrayed by my choice of visuals from a great designer… this stop-motion bursting lemon image is frenetic when it should be calming, and the background should be green not purple for a restful, natural cure. And yep, that reversed out type is pretty hard to read.

Inside is lots of good stuff which the recipient of this package never got to see. There are two headlines I like: “Pamper Yourself Healthy” and “Natural Cures that Feel as Good as They Work”. Either one of these might have given me a fighting chance if I’d used it on the outer.

Once again the marketplace—and David Ogilvy—are right.