The airline Song is dead. As Seth notes on his blog, Song was a superficial attempt to create a new airline with a new value proposition. The superficial part was that it was more about the "brand is who we say we are" approach than the much more real "brand is what we do" approach.
The cool part of Seth’s post is his insight that this event can be looked upon as a total failure, or as an opportunity to learn. If you can do the latter, and treat everything as an experiment to be learned from, no matter if the outcome is "good" or "bad", then you’re well on your way to a process of creating ventures that starts to look a lot like design thinking.
Life is a free seminar – there is always something to learn. The PBS Frontline show The Persuaders featured what seemed to me at the time the all too shallow attempts at designing Song. The demise of Song seemed obvious from the beginning.
Everything is an experiment. 🙂
I just have to say this somewhere, but seriously, I am just reading through The Big Moo and I peruse Seth Godin’s site every here and again, but I must take a stance. This is all common sense.
In today’s super-competitive world, it just takes working with what you know, with whom you know, and treating people with respect.
That is the key behind their whole Remarkable propaganda. They sell it like sugar cane, and it’s beginning to remind me of Madonna and The Kabbalah Centre, selling “being nice” in a fancy suit.
Argh!
Don’t put up the façade of what you do, just be who you are — whether you’re an individual or a bloody corporation. Song can’t pretend to be Jet Blue or whatever it is you have in the U.S. there, as much as some company can pretend to be Gore or Google.