If you know anything about marketing, you’ve heard about a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) — that component of your service or product that separates you from all your competitors. Southwest Airlines has benefitted from its USP of free baggage — one of the few carriers to still offer the perk. Until now. The airline announced that beginning May 28, that wildly popular feature is going away for all except those who purchase business class tickets.
I remember then-CEO Gary Kelly giving “an unambiguous thumbs down to the idea. We will not charge for bags,” he said. And ditto for change fees. “SWA would lose a billion dollars if we started doing those things.” That was in 2015, but a new CEO and new decade have obviously ushered in a different philosophy. Southwest recently changed its seating practices away from open seating and now is adding on fees and several other restrictions, making it even more like every other carrier.
Being unique or on the fringe is a scary place to be. It’s far more comfortable to gravitate toward the middle and be like everyone else. But the whole point of a USP is to make yourself different from others in your market, to embrace that difference, and to leverage it. Southwest certainly did that with its heavily promoted “bags fly free” benefit but it sold its soul. Good luck competing instead with the Universal Selling Proposition of lowest price.
