Unfortunately, it’s much easier to find examples of brands that are falling down on the authenticity job than those which consistently succeed. That’s why a recent experience I had with Southwest Airlines was so intriguing to me.

A few weeks ago a group of MWC staffers and I were at the Southwest ticket counter checking our bags, and we ran into a particularly nasty agent. She seemed angry at us for simply being there, and scolded us as she rushed us for no apparent reason. There were no long lines, we weren’t late for our flight—we simply offended her by showing up. Or maybe she was just having a bad day.

As we joked about it on the way through security, I noticed how I was interpreting the event differently than I would have if she had worked for, say, American or Delta. In that case it would have been easy to count the bad experience as one more example of how legacy airlines don’t give a rip about their customers. I know I’m overstating it a bit, but  I have come to expect poor treatment from those brands (hey, at least they’re consistent).

In this case, however, I not only gave Southwest a pass, I actually felt sorry for the brand. One of their own was behaving in a way that hurt it, and I didn’t want that to happen. Southwest has been so consistently authentic over the years that the space the brand occupies in my brain simply rejected this one example of rude behavior.

Southwest, like every brand, isn’t perfect. But it is authentic. And that authenticity has built up such equity over time that one bad experience did no damage—in fact, it may have in an odd way enhanced the brand by making me consider why I reacted the way I did. If it happens again soon I may start to reconsider, but for me this experience served as an exception that proved the rule. Kudos to Southwest.

Companies that didn’t make the cut in the column include Nike, Southwest Airlines and Chipotle, among others, and I will be commenting on their brand authenticity (or lack thereof) in upcoming posts, some of which may surprise you.

I’d like to invite your suggestions on other brands that may be particularly authentic—or authenticity-challenged. Feel free to comment below or drop me an email at Steve.McKee@WhenGrowthStalls.com with your thoughts on which, and why. If I use your idea I’ll be happy to give you a plug. And look for my column this week.

Below I’ve listed a handful of popular highlights of When Growth Stalls. I think they offer a window of insight into readers’ thinking as our economy continues to languish. And taken together they offer a nice (if incomplete) overview of the book:

I learned two valuable lessons: number one, insane market momentum can’t go on forever; and number two, even in the best-run companies, growth stalls.

————————————————————————————

To ride out a downturn, it’s important for every company to “store nuts.”

————————————————————————————

The most important thing to remember when hard times hit is to keep your wits about you. Protect your assets, play for the long term, and make sure your people know you have a plan.

————————————————————————————

Trying to get everybody to agree on everything is not leadership, it’s a form of passivity. And it is impossible to boot. What consensus does mean, in this context, is agreement among an organization’s senior leadership about the nature and purpose of the company and where it’s intended to go.

————————————————————————————

“Results are obtained only by concentration of resources, especially by concentration of the scarcest and most valuable resource, people with proven performance capacity.” (Peter Drucker quote)

————————————————————————————

Whether your target is a CEO in the boardroom determining the fate of a multibillion-dollar contract, or a parent in the supermarket deciding between two boxes of cereal, your task is to understand your audience, determine what they’re looking for, and align your product or service with their wants and needs.

————————————————————————————

As the “U.S. Army Leadership” manual knowingly states, “No plan survives initial contact with the enemy.”

If you haven’t picked up a copy of When Growth Stalls yet, I encourage you to do so. It’s available at most bookstores as well as on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble online. As the highlights above (and recent reviews) indicate, its advice is as relevant as ever.

There’s no question the price was high. But was it fair? At first glance, that’s more difficult to answer.

Let’s see. There was a willing buyer, which apparently is happier now in possession of the stamp than it was with two or three million bucks. And there was a willing seller, who (much more understandably) is happier having traded his or her yellow scrap for greenbacks. Both parties believe they are better off having made this transaction. Sounds fair to me.

It’s natural for people to think of  low prices as “fair” and high prices as “unfair.” But where, exactly, does one draw the line between “low” and “high”? The answer differs by category, by product, by geography, by economic conditions, and by a host of other factors that no individual person is fit to judge, other than for himself. A “fair” price is neither high nor low; it’s simply the price at which willing buyers and sellers meet.

Personally, I think the group that bought the stamp is crazy. Unless they can find someone crazier to pay even more for it and make out like bandits.

Now that would be unfair.

Last spring McDonald’s launched a $100 million salvo in support of its new McCafe line of coffee drinks. I (along with everybody else) was worried about how Starbucks would fend off such an attack, and I wrote about how I hoped the company would be careful in how it responded: “Starbucks isn’t just a coffeehouse, it’s a concept. It’s not something to be explained, it’s something to experience. It’s not an argument, it’s an aesthetic.”

I’m happy to report (as a grande-extra-hot-no-water-soy-chai lover) Starbucks is doing well. After retrenching, the company’s same store sales have begun to rise once again, less impacted than anticipated by McDonald’s attack (in part because of an unanticipated convenience factor—a Morgan Stanley analyst calculated that only 23 percent of Starbucks’ locations are within a quarter mile of McDonald’s).

Starbucks has now decided to increase its anemic marketing budget (historically less than 1 percent, a fraction of what fast food chains spend), which is a good sign. But what the company does with those dollars remains critical. I haven’t been a big fan of the argument-based newspaper ads Starbucks has been running.

When Starbucks really began to take off in the mid-1990s, it spent virtually nothing on marketing (a mere $600k in 1995). But the company sought and found the emotional connections surrounding its brand and built upon them everything it became. That’s when “The Third Place” was born, summed up well by an internal video manifesto: ”Coffee and tea. And hope. And a little bit of sanity.”

I implored back in May and I’ll implore again: Don’t say it, Starbucks, show it. Don’t make your advertising about you, make it an extension of you. Let the other guys do the boring, rational stuff, while you leverage the much more powerful emotional and aesthetic dimensions. That’s how your brand became beloved. Don’t now become like every other left-brain-driven retail advertiser.

Let’s hope “a little bit of sanity” prevails and Starbucks won’t be driven by the research deck as it invests its new marketing dollars.

Intuit recently announced its quarterly results—an incredible 13 percent increase in revenue and a 16 percent rise in operating income. This is a company that has enjoyed steady success for a long period of time, and Cook’s remarks reveal insights into why.

Cook revealed the backstory behind the launch of QuickBooks, Intuit’s small business software. Prior to QuickBooks, the company was focused exclusively on Quicken, its groundbreaking consumer product. Subscribing to a belief in a “relentless focus on the customer,” Cook said Intuit was slow and perhaps a bit reluctant to expand to another market. In fact, the idea for QuickBooks arouse when Intuit discovered that 50 percent of Quicken users were using it for business, a fact Cook says he basically ignored for two years.

When they did decide to get into the small business market, Cook and his team did it with nerve. “If you go to a new segment,” he said, “you have to be relentless about building from the ground up. You can’t just hack something together.” Shortly thereafter QuickBooks, “the first accounting software to do accounting without accounting,” was born. The target was companies with fewer than 20 employees who weren’t accountants and didn’t want to be accountants.

With a combination of diligence and urgency, Cook did his homework, drawing on his experience as a brand manager at Procter & Gamble. “It’s very common for people to say they do one thing and then actually do it a slightly different way,” he said, citing as an example the fact that people say they sort laundry more often than they actually do. He focused his team on developing a product with the right functionality, while recognizing the danger of feature creep that tends to plague new software (and delay its launch). “The reason we do version one of any product is so we can do a great version three,” Cook said.

Version one was good enough to win a commanding share of the market, despite a price point ($99) that was double that of competing products. The price was, Cook admitted, “built on a hunch,” but because QuickBooks was dramatically different its price was fairly inelastic.

Since that time Intuit has steadily added features and functionality (and margin) to the QuickBooks suite of products, which now start at $199.95. The company confidently promises that the software will pay for itself in 60 days.

Cook has since relinquished his CEO title (he’s now chairman of the company’s executive committee) but his influence is still apparent and there’s no reason to mess with success. “The difference between a groove and a rut,” Scott says, “is whether your stuck.” I’d say Intuit has been in a groove for some time now.

Of the many passages that caught my attention, this one in particular stood out: “Just like any other complex entity, the Predictable Success organization is far from perfect—it will make mistakes, hit roadblocks, and is just as exposed to the impact of external events beyond its control as any other organization. The difference is in how the Predictable Success organization responds to those difficulties.”

I couldn’t agree more with that statement, and two recent announcements in the business press prove the point.

The first is about the incredible second quarter results announced by Whole Foods, where same store sales rose 8.7 percent. That’s a far cry from the company I wrote about back in August that was distracted by its 2007 acquisition of rival Wild Oats and the drawn-out antitrust battle that resulted. In a Wall Street Journal article around that time, Whole Foods’ founder John Mackey was dismayed by how the company had lost its way, saying “We sell a bunch of junk.” It was then Mackey decided to refocus the brand back to its natural foods roots. Less than a year later, here we are talking about the “predictable success” that resulted.

The second is Ford’s recent announcement that it was shuttering for good its 71-year-old Mercury brand. Ford has done a tremendous job under CEO Alan Mulally of sharpening its focus as a company, but was unfortunately unable to resuscitate a brand that had become unfocused since its 1960′s heyday.

In his book McKeown quotes Jack Welch, who said, “The only way to change people’s minds is with consistency.” Whole Foods recognized the error of its inconsistent ways and quickly recovered, while Mercury languished too long in its own and has paid the ultimate price as a result.

Business is a contact sport, and there are many things that can derail a company for good when growth stalls. But as McKeown points out in his book, each of us can increase the odds of attaining “predictable success” if we’ll stay as alert to what’s happening within our organizations as we do to external events.

Thousands of years ago King Solomon said, “Know well the condition of your flocks.” It’s as good advice now as it was then.

That’s the question posed—and tentatively answered—by scientists at the University of Iowa as published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  They studied a select group of patients with severe amnesia using emotional film clips to investigate whether or not their emotions would persist beyond the memory of the clips they watched.

Sure enough, the emotions lasted longer than the memories. Both positive (happiness) and negative (sadness) emotions were tested, and both yielded similar results. The authors said, “These findings provide direct evidence that a feeling of emotion can endure beyond the conscious recollection for the events that initially triggered the emotion.”

The implications for marketers are significant. Many brands focus their efforts on the rational side of the equation, trying to convince people why they should buy their products or services. This study suggests that emotional appeal is just as—if not more—important. In other words, the emotional associations tied to your brand are more lasting than any specific claims you make.

There’s a cliche in our business that people buy on emotion and justify with fact. Like many cliches, perhaps it attained that status because it’s true. The evidence seems to suggest that’s the case.

Kids who have grown up with the iMac, iPod and iPad may greet the news with a yawn. But those of us who remember the early days are somewhat stunned. Who would have thought ten years ago (let alone twenty or thirty) that Apple, which proudly refused to compromise its way to market share, would ever overtake big, bad Microsoft?

Nobody knows what’s going to happen from here, whether this is a temporary blip or a permanent changing of the guard. But as I look at the future prospects of both companies I can’t help drawing a parallel to similar organizations in another rapidly-changing, highly-competitive sector.

Microsoft is GM. Apple is BMW.

Microsoft, like GM, is big, covers just about everything, and makes products that work well most of the time but have a spotty quality reputation and for the most part don’t excite anyone.  Apple, like BMW, sticks to its core competency, is relentless about design and performance, and as a result is able to command a premium price.

Microsoft, like GM, seems to think building better products is enough, not understanding (or in denial about) the legacy of mediocrity associated with its brand. Apple, like BMW, is completely clear about the power and value of its brand and the vital importance of remaining true to it.

Take two stylish new cars, identical in every respect. Badge one with one of GM’s brands and attach the BMW brand to the other. Which one will people prefer? For which will they pay a premium? Do the same with a new computer or wireless device using the Microsoft and Apple logos, and ask the same questions. The difference is attributable to the brands, the meaning and value of which are driven by the quality and performance of the products to which they’ve been attached over the decades.

I don’t suggest anyone write Microsoft off. The company is run by really smart people, and it’s possible they have the next killer app in the garage right now. But Apple is smart, too, and it understands the whole-brain dimensions of its industry better than anyone.

None of us—and none of them—can predict the future. But I have more confidence that Apple and BMW understand people better than Microsoft and GM. For companies whose focus must always be on the next generation, that’s the holy grail.

That said, I thought it would be interesting to catch the final episode, so I sat down and tried to make sense of it along with everybody else. Most notable to me—no surprise here—were the commercials, which were selling for nearly a million dollars a spot. Of specific note were the Target commercials.

If you saw the show, you know what I’m talking about. Target always does a good job with its advertising, but it took unique advantage of this television event by having fun with historical LOST plotlines, tying them to computer keyboards, barbeque sauce and smoke alarms, among other things. The products themselves didn’t matter, as they were just pegs for the inside jokes.

Those jokes are what was so smart about Target’s strategy. By tying its spots to LOST’s imagery and icons, not only did the commercials command viewers’ attention, they effectively said, “Hey, Target’s a LOST fan too. We get it.” It was as if Target had been sitting down in front of the tube right alongside every LOST viewer for the past six years.

People do business with people they trust, and sharing common experiences builds trust. During the LOST season finale, Target reinforced its friendship with millions of customers who are fanatical fans of the show. Whether it sells more barbeque sauce or smoke alarms the next day isn’t the point. Advertising is about building awareness, preference and bonds of affection, and Target used its multi-million dollar LOST buy to do just that. Bravo.