A Song Falls Flat

When Song, Delta Air Lines' experiment at operating an "airline-within-an-airline" failed in the latter part of 2005, it did not come as much of a surprise to many airline industry analysts or enthusiasts like me. Let's face it - these sorts of ventures don't exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to success: someone only has to look at the failures of Shuttle by United, Continental Lite, US Airways' Metrojet, and, most recently Ted (the successor of Shuttle by United).

PBS's Frontline newsmagazine took an in-depth look at the behind-the-scenes workings of Song when the founding team was putting together the brand prior to the airline's launch in 2003. Hindsight may be 20/20 in these situations, but as self-described "marketing medic" John Moore wrote in his blog Brand Autopsy back in 2005, that time spent on developing the Song brand might have proven to be the airline's downfall.

To use a musical analogy (as Song was wont to do), Song was trying to sing too hard and outstretched its vocal cords to the point of permanent damage.

"Song was too busy creating a brand to think about being a business," Moore wrote. The by-product of that brand, he says, was the creation of a weak business. Companies like Starbucks, which let the way they did their business build their brand, succeeded because of this mentality. The central value that Starbucks instills in its partners (not employees; your surly editor knows this because he himself was a Starbucks partner for the better part of three years) is the creation of a "third place," a welcoming place between home and work.

Starbucks accomplished that not by putting big banners in Manhattan proclaiming that a neighborhood Starbucks is your "third place," but by instilling business practices that enabled their customers to perceive this for themselves. "The business creates the brand," wrote Moore, and few have followed that philosophy as well as Starbucks.

P.S. Through the research for this post, Brand Autopsy has won itself a place on my blogroll. There's lots of fascinating stuff on there for the branding enthusiast, I encourage you to check it out.