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Our digital marketing efforts really started with our own website. So kind of in the early
days, especially in travel, travel was a forerunner to one of the success areas in getting people
to book on line. So purchase your product on line. Travel was an early adopter. Relatively
the consumer was sort of ready to embrace. You know, it was not hard to buy, you know,
I’m buying a seat on this flight and here is the price. And they actually saw a benefit,
because prior to being able to book on line you had to call on the phone. And there was
always this, as great as our customer service is and our phone agents in assisting you with
that, there was always this mystery of well maybe there was-- if I did this or did that
I could have gotten a better price because you couldn’t see what the agent could see.
You couldn’t see her screen. Well, the consumer was very much ready to morph into on line
where they could get a one page view and see everything that was available and choose and
make their own choices. Well, if you leave on this day I can kind of adjust my travel
and get a better deal. So for Southwest we already had a direct relationship with our
customers via phone. We-- versus the rest of the industry, had more of our customers
calling us directly. So this is all kind of pre internet. So when we morphed to on line,
those very same customers, we didn’t need to retrain them to come to Southwest.com.
And there’s sort of a funny aside, our 1-800 number is 1-800-IFLYSWA. When we first created
Southwest, our website which is now called Southwest.com, the site URL was IflySWA.com.
So we took what was already learned behavior, which was phone, migrated you to the web and
used the same marketing, you know, sort of same brand ID. And then we had to sort of
untrain a little bit. So today if you still type in IflySWA.com it’ll redirect to Southwest.com.
So we took phone, you knew us on the phone, migrated us to the web. And in the early days
of digital marketing, that’s where it was happening. The sort of experience the brand
in this new format we used the same philosophy, which was very interesting back then. We wanted
to invite you into our on line home. So we had, again, where we sort of differentiated
ourselves from the rest of the industry and even the travel industry, the on line travel
wholesalers and all that, our sort of view on it was this is your first experience with
the brand. So we invited you in. We didn’t have a booking widget of any kind on the home
page for years. We wanted to introduce you to the brand, meet us, and a lot of times
we had the faces-- it started with the faces of our employees. So much like you’d get
welcomed onto a flight, we welcomed you onto the web. And then you tell us, you know, where
you want to go on page two, so to speak. Well, people thought we were crazy. They were like,
“You could be making so much more money.” We were like, okay, well first we need to
introduce you to the brand. This could be your first interaction. It was all about opening
up the brand to new consumers and building that relationship from the first click, if
you will. So used to be first call, now it was, you know, moving to first click. The
other thing we did differently is we don’t put, to this day, Southwest Airlines product,
our airfares are not displayed on any of the websites. So we have a direct-- we’ve continued
that direct to customer relationship for the same reason. We want you to-- we consider
the web that first relationship builder. And we didn’t want your first interaction to
be elsewhere and then not deal with the brand until you actually took the flight. To this
day-- I mean there’s people in the industry think that’s crazy. Why wouldn’t you want
to mass distribute and get your product in as many shelves as possible. We’ve always
thought that we are the best representation of our product, from the beginning of the
relationship, which is in these days on line 80 percent of our revenue comes through Southwest.com.
So to not want to be that first interaction with that kind of a universe and those kind
of numbers, and then when they actually get to take the flight, they actually get to see
all of our live representation and get to deal with the customer service on a one on
one basis.