Jan07
17
As Simple As That?
Shel Holtz is raving about Southwest Airlines’ contest - Wanna Get Away? - which encourages Southwest customers to co-create ads, and now their redesign of the homepage of the Southwest website.
They are simply asking customers to send photo’s of places Southwest has taken them - emphasizing the company’s ‘Freedom to Fly’ mission.
Can it really be as simple as that? A redesign of a homepage that offers customers co-ownership of the finished product? It’s common sense. But it’s also so powerful. Southwest has a religious following in the States, highlighted when they were featured as a case study in Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell’s Creating customer Evangelists.
I’m blown away by how simple these initiatives are and how powerful an impact they are having. Points that strike me:
1. The customers are doing all the hard work on a job (homepage redesign) that was scheduled to happen anyway.
2. They are happy to do it because they share ownership - they are being limelighted.
3. It costs virtually zip.
4. It has a strong viral quality to it.
Damn, make this easy for yourself. What simple, common-sense steps can your company take to give campaigns legs they never had?
Similar, but different, campaign from Virgin America that involves the public in a lesser but more permanent endeavour of “Name our Planes”.
I wrote about it here .
[...] would blame me for saying so. With minimal effort they could have developed a website to evoke some responsive engagement. It seems their goal was to have the message carry itself rather than putting in some work [...]