Positioning Southwest Airlines through employee branding

As the field of employee branding has begun to unfold, more and more executives have become interested in how this process can help them achieve a competitive advantage for their organizations. This article explains how employee branding works and how it can be utilized to position the organization in the minds of customers, employees, and other stakeholders. A contextual analysis of its use as a source of sustainable competitive advantage at Southwest Airlines is presented. Finally, key success factors are identified for those who wish to make employee branding a strategic focus within their organizations. D 2005 Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. All rights reserved. 1. Employee branding and Southwest Airlines: A winning combination Employee branding as a source of strategic competitive advantage has been a basis for discussion in recent years. While practitioners focused on the importance of employee branding and its positive outcomes, their discourse often lacked focus because they did not agree on the term’s definition or its conceptualization. Clarity was added when our 2004 Journal of Relationship Marketing article (Miles & Mangold, 2004) defined employee branding as bthe process by which employees internalize the desired brand image and are motivated to project the image to customers and other organizational constituentsQ (p. 68). The conceptualization presented along with this definition provided insight into how organizations could achieve a competitive advantage by strategically utilizing the employee branding process. In this work, we extend our previous conceptualization by presenting a contextual analysis of Southwest Airlines’ use of the employee branding process to gain an organizational bpositionQ in the minds of customers. Our extension also acknowledges the key role the organization’s mission and values play in the employee branding process, and recognizes that employees must have knowledge of the desired brand image if they are to project that image to others. This analysis will lead to a better understanding of the use of employee branding as a 0007-6813/$ see front matter D 2005 Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2005.04.010 T Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (S.J. Miles)8 [email protected] (W.G. Mangold).