Copying a rival's how without its why got the practices but not the loyalty; the airline case is weak because cost structure also explains it.

The claim

Copying another organisation's practices without its cause does not reproduce its results. Two large carriers copied a low-cost airline's how (cheap, fun, simple) in separate low-cost units; both units were cheap, fun and simple, and both closed within about four years, while the original kept its loyalty and its profits. The reading offered is that customers had no reason to see the copies as more than another airline, so they could compete only on price and convenience. From our own knowledge, not from the corpus: the standard explanation for those closures is cost structure (legacy labour contracts and fleets inside a low-fare unit), which the missing-cause reading does not exclude, so the case is weak evidence.