Southwest likely to weather bad news

— -- BrandIndex, which tracks consumers' attitudes toward 1,025 companies on a daily basis, reports that Southwest's "buzz score" fell 23 points in a week, from 22% on March 5 — before news broke about Southwest's failure to conduct mandatory inspections of the planes for possible metal fatigue cracks — to -1% on Tuesday. Then, on Wednesday, Southwest grounded 38 of its planes to redo inspection for a different set of possible fatigue cracks.

Ted Marzilli, BrandIndex's senior vice president, says that -1% score on Tuesday was the lowest buzz score Southwest has recorded since tracking began last June. The buzz score, he said, measures how many of its survey respondents have positively interpreted recent news about a company, minus those who interpreted it negatively. BrandIndex surveys about 5,000 Americans each day, selected randomly from a pool of more than 2 million who've signed up to participate in the Internet surveys.

Some travelers have been spooked by the Southwest news.

But Marzilli says Southwest's overall reputation will mitigate the short-term damage.

BrandIndex also tracks what it calls "brand health" by scoring the companies it tracks in six categories: quality, value, corporate reputation, satisfaction, willingness to recommend, and overall image. Southwest is one of the top-ranking companies, in any industry, in brand health, Marzilli says. Its score typically is more than double that of the next closest airlines, American and British Airways.