Walmart and Delta's winning formula to lure customers

Walmart and Delta shares have reached all-time highs thanks to their CEOs' winning formula.

Transcript

00:00Both Walmart and Delta Airlines shares have been around all-time highs lately,

00:04and the CEOs of both companies have been pursuing surprisingly similar strategy.

00:09Hi, I'm Phil Waba, Senior Correspondent for Leadership at Fortune.

00:13In 2015, Walmart CEO Doug McMillan was under a lot of pressure to narrow the gap between Walmart

00:19and Amazon. And so when he announced that he was going to pour billions of dollars to give

00:23store workers raises to improve customer service, but also at the same time spend a lot of money to

00:29upgrade the technology in the stores so that stores and e-commerce could blend together and

00:34outdo Amazon, Wall Street was skeptical. Ten years later, the last laugh is on Wall Street.

00:39Walmart shares have hit an all-time high, proving that playing the long game really pays off.

00:44Similarly, Delta has been working for years to get its customers to pay for premium

00:49seats on airplanes. For the longest time, up until about just a few years ago,

00:54the premium seats were giveaways to frequent travelers. But in the last 10 years,

00:59Delta has been retraining its passengers to pay for premium first class and the like.

01:04And now the result is that Delta is the most profitable airline in the United States,

01:08and it is well positioned to keep going up in terms of what they call the premiumization of

01:13air travel, which means going after well-heeled travels.

01:16So what's the takeaway for other CEOs and other industries?

01:19If you take a long-term view of things, and rather than go quarter by quarter,

01:24you too can see your company's shares hit all-time highs well into their corporate middle age.