Qantas: PR activity will ramp up once our customers are back in the air
The Qantas in-house PR team is to attempt to get back on the front foot as the airline attempts to move on from the weekend’s fleet grounding.
A spokeswoman for the embattled airline told Mumbrella: “We’re dealing with the media enquiries to give the most up-to-date information regarding the grounding of the aircraft. Once we move past this initial phase we’ll certainly be increasing our proactive PR projects.
“Whenever we have an incident we increase our PR activity working with our marketing teams and commercial teams and other areas around the business. We have got a number of upcoming activities planned.”
“At the moment, the focus is getting our customers on planes. There will obviously be a campaign going forward.”
Qantas has said public relations will remain with the in-house team, with no plans to involve a PR or crisis management agency.
David Van of The De Wintern Group, a crisis management firm, told Mumbrella: “Sometimes business or legal matters must take precedence over public relations. This seems to have been the case this week.
“The challenge for Qantas now is to create a structured reputation remediation program, and their corporate communications team should expect, and get, the full weight of management support behind their efforts,” he said.
Meanwhile, a Qantas spokesperson told The Australian today that “customers could expect a marketing campaign soon.” The newspaper suggested that Qantas would launch a multi-million-dollar PR and marketing campaign to restore the airline’s image.
In a statement, Qantas said: “Our roster of agencies have been working on regular retail activities. These are not a response to the industrial action. Following the grounding of the airline over the weekend and the subsequent disrupt to our passengers we are now looking at customer care recovery strategies to re-engage and reward our loyal customers.”
Qantas is currently holding a review of its creative and media roster with M&C Saatchi, Publicis Mojo and Ogilvy in the running for the creative business.
Yesterday, James Wright, GM of Red Agency told Mumbrella that the Qantas brand “would never be the same again”.
The Qantas crisis will be dissected in The Gruen Planet’s ‘crisis management’ segment on Wednesday night’s episode on ABC1.
Really? The Qantas brand will never be the same? Do people really care? I don’t. I fly Qantas not because they are wonderful human beings with a fuzzy touchy feely brand, who take care of their staff and run well thought our PR campaigns, but because I want the FF points, or they have the flights I want at the price I want to pay at the time I want to fly, if they don’t, then I fly someone else – like V Australia who are all kinds of awesome. But that doesn’t mean I’m not flying Qantas come March when I have to head back to the US. I am, because, they have the flights I want at the price I want to pay at the time I want to fly. Simple.
User ID not verified.
what a confused article
are we talking about PR, or about advertising
are we talking about retail PR, which there may have been little of, or corporate PR, of which there would have been ceaseless amounts of – poor Olivia Wurth must be a spent unit
Qantas has been working the press like nobody’s business for the better part of 3 months now!
User ID not verified.
Why doesn’t Virgin use this to advantage? There has to be a way to capitalise on the negative brand sentiment and turn it into a win for them – surely their ad agency is churning out proactive ideas.
User ID not verified.
Hi Sasha,
Article now somewhat updated.
Cheers – Tim, Mumbrella
Mmmm too little too late, you can spend a gazillion dollars on ads and ‘marketing’ but you have not communicated with your most important people, the customers. So glossing it over with a new ad featuring Hugh Jackman, Keith Urban and a Kangaroo ain’t gonna cut it, (although might be funny, no disrespect to either of these guys). Again, no crisi management plan, and a moderated ‘all smiles and positivity’ Twitter feed means jack! People are not stupid and will not return when there are soo many better alternatives, again a huge shame and a loss for Australia. Looking forward to Gruen….
User ID not verified.
I still think that a crisp refresh of the logo font will do the trick…
User ID not verified.