Is Qantas dead?

Of course everyone is talking about Qantas and it is very hard to step aside from the furor, after all, they are one of my favourite brand whipping boys. But there is a bigger issue at play here than Alan Joyce’s epic dummy spit and accompanying collective meltdown and over reaction by media and business analysts.

The short-term cost to Qantas of the shutdown will be measured in the tens of millions of dollars. The long-term cost to the company in terms of damage to their reputation and the decimation of trust of both customers and employees is much harder to measure.

The Qantas brand took a severe beating these past few days with approximately 70,000 promises broken and that’s just the passengers who were already travelling.

So here is where we get to the heart of the issue with Qantas’ actions.

Can you recover from that kind of loss of trust? If you were a Qantas passenger stranded due to the decision made by the board and CEO, would you risk booking your next flight with them? If you were one of the domestic pilots who were not even involved in any industrial action and were still locked out from doing your job, would you approach negotiations next year with good faith?

Alan Joyce claims he had no choice. What absolute rubbish. There are always other choices, but he and the board made this their choice. They decided that the heritage of Qantas wasn’t important, that the customers were not important, that the employees who keep the planes in the air and the passengers happy were not important, that the reputation of the company was not important – that the brand was not important.

I have no issue with Qantas’ right to choose the direction for their future, but when you do you have to live with the good and the bad of that decision. They don’t get to have it both ways. They can’t move significant portions of your operations to Asia and still be Australia’s airline. They can’t give the CEO a two million dollar pay rise and tell employees no to their request for higher pay. They can’t threaten to offshore 1,000 jobs and then expect people to believe they are committed to Australia. They do have to choose, and it seems that by their actions they have.

The actions of Joyce and his board of accomplices has clearly demonstrated they consider the Qantas that millions of Australians here and around the world have had long affection for is dead. The rest of us just have to catch up.

Never has it been truer that brands are built on action and decision, and are destroyed the same way.

See you next week.

Michel Hogan is an independent Brand adviser and advocate. Through her work with Brandology here in Australia and in the United States she helps organisations make promises they can keep and keep the promises they make, with a strong sustainable brand as the result. She also publishes the Brand thought leadership blog – Brand Alignment. You can follow Michel on Twitter @michelhogan.