In Marketing, Timing is Everything
Posted by Debra Semans on Tue, Dec 06, 2011 @ 11:23 AM
The competition to define the ultimate in-flight experience in a tweet for the "Qantas Luxury" competition was supposed to build good will and customer engagement.
It was also not supposed to launch a day after Qantas and its union broke off contract negotiations and the airline grounded its fleet in a drastic move that stranded thousands of angry customers.
So instead of goodwill, Qantas got backlash.
Qantas took the drastic step to ground all flights on Saturday (OCtober 30, 2011), disrupting 70,000 passengers and spurring the government and its labor-market regulator to seek a quick end to hostilities between the airline and unions. At the government's instigation, Australia's labor tribunal ordered Qantas to resume flights and banned trade unions, which have waged a damaging campaign of industrial action, from staging more strikes while negotiations continued.
Amid a background of unions considering more flight disruptions, this is the tweet that started it all and the tweet that Qantas sent after realizing that it was facing a massive response. (To its credit, Qantas later tweeted "at this rate our #QuantasLuxury competition is going to take years to judge.")
PR experts quoted by Reuters called the campaign "the Hindenburg of social media strategies" and an "excellent case study in cultural tone deafness." Needless to say, angry customers tweeted extensively and creatively. My favorite defined "Quantas Luxury" as "flyinh Singapore Airlines."
You really have to wonder how this competition was launched amid one of the bitterest labor disputes in the airline's history! Was the marketing department completely out to lunch? Or, if this was a contest managed by another company, how did that company miss this important event? Qantas is not in any way unusual in making PR miss-steps: it happens all the time to all kinds of companies! The key question is: Why?
What do you think? How could this contest have been launched the day after the airline stranded 70,000 customers?
