How Montana and Spirit Airlines Won by Being Honest

He also notices packaging that feels more expressive and less impersonal to him. The box becomes a supporting cue, suggesting a different attitude. But it accompanies his changed opinion of the pizza rather than replacing the need for one.

This is an important limit on design’s role. Packaging can make a change easier to notice. It cannot establish that the underlying criticism has been resolved when the next bite contradicts the message.

Do’s personal preference adds another useful qualification. He is not praising Domino’s for becoming an artisanal restaurant. He describes enjoying a particular kind of greasy American pizza with his son.

The desired transformation is not from ordinary to universally prestigious. It is from an unsatisfying version of an offer to a version the customer actively wants.

That gives a second-chance invitation something specific to accomplish. The business is not asking the customer to erase the past out of generosity. It is asking for an opportunity to place new evidence beside the old memory.

Do suggests making that opportunity tangible through a complimentary drink or another concrete gesture. The gesture creates an occasion to demonstrate improvement; it does not substitute for improvement.

The apology opens the door. The experience has to do the convincing.

A Modest Offer Does Not Need a Grand Disguise

Not every unfavorable description identifies a failure that needs to be repaired. Some descriptions point to the nature of the offer itself. A low-cost service can be limited without being dishonest, provided its presentation makes those limits clear.

Do turns to Spirit Airlines to examine that distinction. His description is pointed: “a bus with wings.” It is a characterization used in his argument, not a documented company slogan or a claim about a particular campaign’s results.

He frames the positioning choice as a hypothetical. A bargain airline should not present itself as Virgin Atlantic, Singapore Airlines, or Emirates. In his comparison, borrowing the associations of a very different experience would make the claim less believable, not the offer more appealing.

Position the offer that actually exists.

This is not an argument for accepting poor execution. The earlier demand still holds: a company has to deliver its promise. The distinction is between failing to provide what was promised and offering something deliberately less elaborate.

A business creates confusion when it treats every limit as an embarrassment to conceal. It can end up implying benefits it does not provide, attracting expectations it cannot meet, and then facing disappointment that clearer positioning would have helped prevent.

Do proposes another approach: acknowledge the bargain proposition and bring a sense of humor to it. The appeal comes from the absence of pretense. Customers do not have to reconcile an elevated sales pitch with an obviously modest experience.

In his argument, candor becomes part of the relationship. The company recognizes the same reality the customer recognizes. That shared understanding can be more persuasive than an attempt to talk the customer out of what is already apparent.

• Do not describe a bargain offer as a luxury experience.
• Make the limited proposition clear rather than evasive.
• Use humor to acknowledge reality, not to contradict it.

The distinction also changes how a brand chooses its comparisons. Measuring a bargain service against a luxury promise it never intended to fulfill produces the wrong test. The more useful question is whether the actual proposition is understandable and delivered honestly.

That issue belongs beside the audience questions raised by Know Your Audience. Positioning is not simply a favorable description of a business. In Do’s examples, it has to connect the nature of the offer with the expectations of the person considering it.

A modest offer can become clearer without becoming more elaborate. The work is not always to add benefits. Sometimes it is to stop implying the wrong ones.

That creates an important fork in the argument. The service-oriented company needs to repair conduct that contradicts its claim. The bargain airline in Do’s hypothetical needs a claim that fits its intended experience.

One requires the business to change. The other requires the business to stop pretending it is something else.

Confusing those situations leads to the wrong remedy. A clever acknowledgment will not repair broken service. An expensive attempt to imitate a different category will not necessarily clarify a sound bargain proposition.

Personality Works Best Without the Pretending

Once the promise fits the offer, personality has a useful role to play. Do does not argue that modest businesses should communicate in a flat, apologetic voice. He argues that honesty can create room for humor, warmth, and a more distinctive relationship.

His airline examples make the distinction tangible. In his description of Southwest, the appealing quality is not an imitation of luxury. It is the human energy of employees who bring humor to an otherwise routine interaction.

Do recalls flight attendants making unusual announcements and telling jokes. His interest is in what that behavior contributes to the experience: a limited service need not feel indifferent simply because it is limited.

“Bring sense of humor. Bring some charm,” he says.

The order established earlier remains essential. Personality follows an honest understanding of the offer. It should not be asked to conceal the difference between what the business promises and what it provides.

Charm should reinforce the truth, not replace it.

This is a narrower and more useful claim than suggesting that funny brands automatically succeed. Do offers no performance measure establishing humor as a universal route to better results. He describes why a self-aware voice appeals to him and how it can make an ordinary experience feel more personable.

The appeal depends on congruence. Humor acknowledges the experience rather than pretending the customer has entered an entirely different one. The business and the customer are responding to the same situation, which makes the personality feel connected to reality.

His tourism anecdote uses a similar reversal. The creative idea he recounts takes the perception of an empty destination and reframes open landscapes as the attraction. The useful lesson is the change in interpretation, not an independently established claim about a tourism campaign’s commercial success.

Absence can be disappointing under one expectation and appealing under another. A destination does not have to acquire a different landscape for the audience to see value in what is already there. The message can clarify the significance of an existing characteristic.

That is different from denying the characteristic. A message that insists a quiet place is bustling asks the audience to believe something the experience will contradict. A message that makes quiet appealing gives the audience a different reason to choose it.

The storytelling dimension has a natural companion in Storytelling Is A Superpower. Here, the narrative move is specific: use an existing perception as material rather than treating it only as an obstacle.

Do’s examples also suggest a boundary. A limitation that suits a particular offer can be reframed. A failure to fulfill a promise has to be corrected.

Confusing parking is not an opportunity for a charming explanation when the business promises an effortless welcome. Rude service does not become attentive because the copywriter gives it a knowing tone.

The creative opportunity begins after that distinction is made. Then the brand can decide whether it needs to improve something, explain something, or express something with more personality.

Not every criticism calls for an apology. Not every criticism can be turned into a selling point.

The Promise Has to Survive Another Visit

Do’s argument ends up less concerned with appearing authentic than with becoming difficult to contradict. The business needs a promise that fits its offer, an operation capable of delivering it, and communication that does not ask customers to ignore their own experience.

That produces a practical order of work, although Do does not give it a branded framework or a formal name. The sequence comes directly from his advice: listen, examine the failure, make the changes, and address the perception that remains.

The temptation is to begin at the end. A new message is visible and easier to announce than better training. But visibility does not make communication the first intervention the business needs.

• Listen before defending. Read reviews and examine both favorable and unfavorable sentiment.
• Repair before requesting another chance. Change the hiring, training, or delivery behind the failure.
• Address the old perception directly once the business has changed.
• Offer a concrete opportunity to experience the difference.

The sequence makes an apology more demanding, not less. The company has to identify what it failed to deliver without turning the admission into an elaborate excuse. Then it has to make the new encounter meaningfully different.

A complimentary item can help create that encounter, but its purpose is specific. It gives the customer a reason to return and the company a chance to demonstrate its work. It cannot compensate indefinitely for an operation that still produces the original problem.

For a deliberately limited offer, the work takes a different shape. There is no obligation to imitate a premium competitor simply to avoid acknowledging a tradeoff. The business has to describe that tradeoff clearly enough that the customer understands what is being chosen.

Personality can then make the choice more appealing. Humor can soften an austere offer; warmth can improve an ordinary interaction. Neither changes the underlying obligation to keep the promise.

The most revealing test is the next encounter. A customer who accepts the invitation to return should not have to search for evidence that something changed. The improvement needs to appear in the product, the assistance, or the behavior that previously caused disappointment.

This is why Do keeps returning to execution. The business cannot control whether a customer forgives it, enjoys its humor, or adopts its preferred description. It can control whether its people and its offer provide a reasonable basis for that response.

“It's execution that wins the game,” he says.

The standard is therefore more concrete than a reputation campaign. A service promise has to survive contact with the staff. A product claim has to survive use. A candid bargain proposition has to remain candid when the customer experiences its limits.

The message is only the beginning of that test.

For a business facing a credibility gap, the next move is not automatically a rebrand, an apology, or a joke. It is an honest diagnosis of whether the offer is broken, the promise is inflated, or the value is being poorly explained.

Then the company has to do the corresponding work.

The customer does not owe the brand a better interpretation. The brand owes the customer better evidence.