Southwest Airlines Value Chain Analysis
Southwest Value Chain Analysis
Outcomes / Accomplishments: low price, convenience service, customer loyalty low turnover & low costs, great union relationships, customers are brand ambassadors.
Southwest Airlines (SWA) is consistent in their culture, business model, and customer interactions and engagement, all collectively reducing costs and enabling their point-to-point, efficient, low cost, friendly service. Their culture favors personal connection, community, recognition, support, and love. This “luv” has been the central theme of SWA for decades, especially with regard to their customer interactions. Luv fortifies the SWA value chain, spanning across corporate vision, operations, marketing, cost control, people, and corporate culture, thus creating value in reducing costs and growing bottom lines, maximizing (minimally spent) marketing dollars, capturing customer interest, sustaining customer loyalty, and maximizing work output of all employees.
SWA’s primary resources are its people / employees. Its material goods such as airplanes are valuable, but not rare. Its business model, strategy and ability to implement phenomenal customer and people-centric visions are also its key resources and capabilities. Its people and business model are extremely valuable, rare, costly to imitate, and organized to capture value. Creating and sustaining the SWA culture internally and externally is extremely difficult to reproduce, for this is an organic production that begins with a loving, personable, and wise management team who understand people, business, and execution. Such human beings are rare. Moreover, these people and business model and strategies are organized to capture value, in that they operate within the thriving function of the profitable business that is SWA. SWA returned a profit in 1992, when no other airline was able to do so, in addition to receiving the “triple crown” of the airline industry many consecutive years, a testament to SWA’s ability
Outcomes / Accomplishments: low price, convenience service, customer loyalty low turnover & low costs, great union relationships, customers are brand ambassadors.
Southwest Airlines (SWA) is consistent in their culture, business model, and customer interactions and engagement, all collectively reducing costs and enabling their point-to-point, efficient, low cost, friendly service. Their culture favors personal connection, community, recognition, support, and love. This “luv” has been the central theme of SWA for decades, especially with regard to their customer interactions. Luv fortifies the SWA value chain, spanning across corporate vision, operations, marketing, cost control, people, and corporate culture, thus creating value in reducing costs and growing bottom lines, maximizing (minimally spent) marketing dollars, capturing customer interest, sustaining customer loyalty, and maximizing work output of all employees.
SWA’s primary resources are its people / employees. Its material goods such as airplanes are valuable, but not rare. Its business model, strategy and ability to implement phenomenal customer and people-centric visions are also its key resources and capabilities. Its people and business model are extremely valuable, rare, costly to imitate, and organized to capture value. Creating and sustaining the SWA culture internally and externally is extremely difficult to reproduce, for this is an organic production that begins with a loving, personable, and wise management team who understand people, business, and execution. Such human beings are rare. Moreover, these people and business model and strategies are organized to capture value, in that they operate within the thriving function of the profitable business that is SWA. SWA returned a profit in 1992, when no other airline was able to do so, in addition to receiving the “triple crown” of the airline industry many consecutive years, a testament to SWA’s ability