It’s not Qantas that has the reputation problem, it’s marketers

Holy shit! Someone actually said something almost positive about Qantas! Apparently the new Roy Morgan data is showing the airline “moving away from a highly distrusted position”. This is hardly a signal to crack open the First Class champagne just yet over at Mascot, but any analysis that spots a few “green shoots of trust recovery” must be a good thing.

No brand cops it quite like Qantas. Once the “Spirit of Australia”— synonymous with safety, reliability and bringing homesick expats back to their mums — the national carrier has spent much of the last decade as a kangaroo-shaped piñata.

Marketing experts line up behind branding gurus and business journos to take repeated whacks at Australia’s national carrier. To be fair, there has been plenty to aim at.  A steady parade of booking debacles, “ghost flights”, a cheerless COVID response, an errant overpaid CEO and various data breaches have kept the commentary busier than Tullamarine on Easter Monday.

The apparent reputational slide started in earnest during those strange post-pandemic days of 2022. Sacking ground staff, stuffing up refunds, outsourcing core operations—every “efficiency” play seemed to trade trust for dollars. By 2024, Qantas had plummeted from its gilded place as one of the top five most trusted Aussie brands to one of the five least trusted in the country in Roy Morgan’s data.

Ask most marketers for a brand in trouble and the flying kangaroo is probably top of the list. The usual old bollocks about building brands over decades and destroying them in days is trotted out. Someone else will discuss brand relationships. Another will bang on about a brand being a promise. Blah blah blah.

But here’s the inconvenient truth for all those marketers and journalists that have lined up to take down Qantas over the last few years: the airline could not be in better shape. It’s a spectacular business. It’s in rude health. And by any proper estimation one of the best brands in Australia.

Don’t pity the pinata: Qantas is making more than 2000 million dollars a year in profit

I appreciate its critical reception could be better. But, for once, stop banging the stupid drum and look at Qantas and its performance during its alleged “brand crisis” of the past three years.

Start with the top line. Qantas posted record revenue—$23.8 billion for the 12 months to June 2025, an 8.6% jump over the previous year. Demand for both Qantas and Jetstar is at post-pandemic highs, driven by strong travel demand, business rebound and the utterly unbending need for Aussies to cross this big red continent for work, funerals, footy and everything in between.

And unlike most stupid Aussie brands, Qantas isn’t discounting its way to growth. It’s packing more bums on seats and seeing higher fares at the same time. As a result, underlying profit before tax is up 15%, reaching $2.39 billion. How about that for brand failure? Both Jetstar and Qantas Domestic are posting their best earnings in years.

The share price has doubled over the very same three years that marketers have been boring us about Qantas being in deep brand trouble. It jumped 8% off the back of the FY25 result and remains one of the best-performing travel shares on the planet. Price targets hover between $9 and $12, with broad consensus that Qantas is, if anything, over-earning right now. Dividends are back, shareholders are smiling and the balance sheet is so robust Qantas is paying staff with actual shares rather than just promises and plastic pins.

So how do we explain the apparent dichotomy between marketers’ pessimistic perspective and Qantas’s stellar commercial performance?

For starters all that cock from Roy Morgan about brand trust needs to be taken with a massive dose of salt. Obviously, trust is a generally positive thing. But it’s also an anthropomorphic stretch. You need to trust your husband, your doctor, your kid’s teacher. But you don’t need to apply the same rubric to banks, chocolate bars and wide screen TVs. It doesn’t work that way. Do you trust your mobile phone? Do you need to? Have you ever thought about it?

Sure, Roy Morgan will do the measurements and wang on about it every year with neat little tables and nice press releases. And lazy journos are going to scoop it up, especially if it confirms their consensus view that Qantas is fucked. But that does not mean it is as meaningful or important as everyone assumes.

You want proof? Well along with Qantas, Australia’s other least trusted brands according to Roy Morgan include Coles, Woolworths, Facebook, Telstra and Temu. I put it to you that this is not just a list of untrusted brands. It is also a list of some of the biggest, most successful, most profitable companies in Australia. Ergo, I also put it to you that brand trust is largely a big bag of oversimplistic piss that we shouldn’t — you know — trust that much as an indicator of business success.

A more important factor for Qantas and any other brand is the more brutal concept of salience. It’s not a concept your Mum or Dad understands, but marketers should know all about it. Does a brand come to mind in buying situations? In Qantas’s case when you need to fly to Bali or Broken Hill which company comes to mind first? Qantas is always there. Always looking like itself. Always around. Always boring, beaten up, but ready to get you there, Qantas.

Salience works its wonders partly because consumers cannot be fucked coming up with lots of alternatives. We are all cognitive misers. But it mostly works because once a brand comes to mind, your brain starts to immediately prefer that option and swing you in its direction. Irrespective of image or trust or any of that horseshit about brand purpose, when a brand comes to mind first it usually gets purchased 70% to 80% of the time. And Qantas rules the cognitive roost here.

Add to that Qantas’s unparalleled, unfair and entirely Australian stranglehold of gates, lounges and routes. If you are going to critique an airline you cannot simply skim the surface for cosmetic flaws. You must assess the whole operational bundle and Qantas not only dominates share of mind but share of airport and airspace too. And that is way more important than a tenuous concept like brand trust.

Smiling, because they control all the gates (Qantas)

And don’t forget the jewel in its crown – the Frequent Flyer program. It has over 14 million members – that’s almost two thirds of the adult population! It’s a billion-dollar earner in its own right and a machine for locking in repeat purchase. Major program upgrades in 2024 and 2025 added millions more reward seats and new partners, supercharging member engagement. Qantas Loyalty’s EBIT rose 9% this year, with new business partners joining at record rates.

Only in the deluded, half-assed world of marketing is Qantas a “brand in trouble”. Look at its profits. Look at its growth. Look at its dominance. Look at its salience. Look at its diversification. Look at anything that matters and ignore all that soft branding horseshit.

It’s not Qantas that has the reputation problem, its marketers. They parrot a stupid and entirely incorrect line showing their almost total disconnection from broader business performance. Ooh some journo in the Fin Review has written about how Qantas is a disgrace. A former frequent flyer is swearing on breakfast TV they will never fly with them again. A useless marketing professor in a bow tie from a former TAFE thinks they illustrate a lack of brand trust. It’s all bollocks. And a few days later all three of these fuckers are checking in for a Qantas flight and enjoying their hypocrisy along with a shitty coffee and an overcooked pastry.

Marketers, it’s time to stop the stupid, stupid, stupid criticism of Qantas. It’s not Qantas that has the problem.

Mark Ritson is a former marketing professor, brand consultant and award-winning columnist. He is also the founder of the MiniMBA in Marketing which runs again next April and does not feature a single bullet point on brand trust across its whole ten week syllabus. He is also a Platinum One member of Qantas Frequent Flyer Program and flies frequently to the UK in case anyone from that fine, fine airline is reading this. 

We will publish a review of Ritson’s MiniMBA course in coming days.