STANDARDS & SIGNALS

In late February of this year, United Airlines added one new line to its Contract of Carriage: passengers who play audio without headphones can be removed from the flight.

The industry then held its breath and waited for some anticipated backlash.

It never came. If anything, most people we’re pleased and relieved.

Meanwhile, Chick-fil-A (which is closed every Sunday since its first restaurant opened in 1946) earned an average of $9.3 million per store in 2024. Remarkably, this is more than double McDonald’s earnings, and achieved in six days of business vs. seven.

These aren’t marketing stories or attention grabbing stunts. These are brand standards and signals. They are functional and fundamental actions that communicate with deep resonance.

Deep cuts, deep memory, deep record.

Where you shine the light is also beam of communication.

A brand standard is a promise that a brand is willing to enforce against its own short-term financial and reputational interests. United could have left “please use headphones” as a polite suggestion buried in their Wi-Fi terms. Instead it moved the language into Rule 21, “Refusal of Transport,” the very same section that governs genuinely disruptive and dangerous behavior.

That’s not a polite request. That’s a clear line in the sand. And their willingness to remove a paying customer in order to hold and reinforce that line is exactly what makes it solid, defensible and credible.

Chick-fil-A does the same thing — but with time. Closing their restaurants on Sunday isn’t a calendaring decision, it’s a founder’s conviction that has cost the company one-seventh of every possible sales per day for nearly eighty years straight. Run that math and it ought to be a financial catastrophe. Instead the constraint has become a loudly ringing brand signal. The one closed day per week tells you what the brand believes, how deeply it believes it, and it makes the other six open days more magnetized, and more loaded with meaning, not less.

The signal is the message.

We are living through the final chapters of a golden age of saying yes. Yes to every customer, every use case, every channel, every quarter. Frictionless, optionality-maxed, terrified of turning anyone (or their wallet) away. And in that environment, the brands that are drawing a hard line around meaning and message, become more legible and durable in a way almost nothing else can.

Mainly because a brand standard only signals something real if it costs something real.

A brand standard with no price attached is just a preference or a temporary whim. United’s new standard costs it the occasional customer confrontation at 35,000 feet. Chick-fil-A’s standard costs it a day or business per week, forever.

That cost is not a bug in the strategy. It is the strategy. The customer reads quite clearly the price you’re willing to pay to operate in this world, and correctly concludes: “this brand knows who they are, this brand knows where they’re going, and and this brand knows exactly how they intend to get there.”

And another thing — the real kicker — is the passage of time. Chick-fil-A being closed on Sunday is a brand standard that has held since 1946. The same signal, every week, for three generations. Conviction, that turns into culture, which turns into trust, and loyalty.

Like other types of investments, brand standards compound over time. They become identity by staying solid and unbroken for long periods of time. Decades. Generations. Most brands refuse to hold anything beyond the next quarterly report. Brands who put a stake in the ground always generate distinction, and stand apart.

John Prine was right. He almost always is.

It’s also worth noting just how small both of these specific brand standard examples are in practice:

• One line added to a contract

• One dark day on the weekly balance sheet

Not a new logo, not an ad campaign, not a rebrand, not a manifesto. Just a brand deciding what it will not do, and then, getting on with it. That’s a clear signal ringing over and over. Repetition is reputation.

It’s not about what you’re willing to offer. It’s about what you’re willing to refuse, and keep refusing, even when it costs you.

The line a brand won’t cross tells people who you are far more reliably and clearly than anything they could ever put into ethereal marketing communications.