Failure point of an airline brand
The monumental baggage problems at Heathrow airport’s new Terminal 5 highlight the importance of what I call brand failure points. Brand failure points are critical company operations that can potentially break the brand if they fail to perform. If they do fail, it’s the brand that pays the price, and the price can be heavy. Full recovery may take years.
Brand failure points often hide behind the scenes, far from the brand limelight. A classic brand failure point for a high-flying airline is, of course, lowly baggage. To an airline, it’s a back room job. To passengers, however, it’s front and center.
Brand failure points: off the brand grid
Brand failure points are especially dangerous because they’re typically off the brand grid. They often inhabit the least glamorous parts of a business, far from the glitz and the glamor. They’re usually not addressed in a typical brand program, especially one that lives large on symbols and fanfare. They’re often outside the direct control of the brand team, tucked away in black boxes and back rooms. Potentially, they are silent brand killers, churning and chugging away in the bowels of the business until they suddenly snap—and take the brand with them.
Failure points and points therein
In this post I’ll first discuss the nature of brand failure points, using Heathrow Terminal 5 as an example. Then I’ll suggest basic steps the brand team can take in identifying potential brand failure points, and in failure point management. The latter requires that the brand team assume a much higher profile in company operations.
Let’s begin with a review of what happened at Heathrow Terminal 5.
The potential for lasting damage
Terminal 5 is a gleaming new wing of Heathrow built at a cost of $8.6 billion on the promise to eliminate airport delays and congestion. It is run by airport company BAA and British Airways (BA) as a prime gateway to BA flights. Terminal 5 puts BA’s brand squarely on the line. Unfortunately, the seriously flawed opening is widely viewed as a brand meltdown for BA, with hundreds of canceled flights and thousands of irate fliers. As a grand opening, it was something of a faceplant.
One report called the inauspicious beginning “an absolute national embarrassment.”
From Bloomberg:
British Airways Plc canceled 54 flights today as the chaos at London Heathrow airport’s new Terminal 5 stretched into a third day.
. . .
“This will clearly go on for days,” said Howard Wheeldon, an analyst at BGC Partners LP in London. “The potential for lasting damage to British Airways is far greater than anything that has gone before.”
“A calamitous debut” according to the Los Angeles Times.
A passenger quoted in the Financial Times:
“What a disaster. I was always told that with the arrival of T5 everything would be better. RUBBISH! I was delayed for 1½ hours on a flight that only takes 90 minutes. I still don’t have my bag.”
Perhaps the Financial Times said it best: it will be a “long haul to restore BA’s reputation.”
What went wrong at Heathrow Terminal 5
These are some of the things that went terribly wrong at Terminal 5 as part of its grand opening:
- Inadequate employee parking caused employees to be late to work as they searched for spaces in employee lots; slow shuttles from alternate lots caused more delays.
- Once at the Terminal, employees could not get to their stations because not enough security personnel were deployed to screen employees before entry.
- Baggage handlers underestimated the time it took to get bags from one part of the (huge) Terminal to another.
- Baggage conveyor belts (10 miles of them) backed up; one belt broke down.
- At one point, 15,000 bags were stuck in the Terminal baggage system.
- The first seven flights of day one left Heathrow without checked baggage.
- In all, 430 flights were canceled.
In addition, as reported by the Independent, BA misinformed affected customers on compensation for delays, and refused to provide hotel rooms for delayed passengers per ticketing agreements.
Failure points can cascade brand damage
Brand failure points have the power to cascade brand damage far beyond their point of origin. The potential brand fallout from BA’s Terminal 5 problems is not just angry passengers without flights and bags (although that’s bad enough). The potential damage is that passengers may decide to avoid Heathrow and British Airways altogether, or maybe skip a UK leg of travel in fear of time-wasting delays, or lost luggage.
Product launch is a brand event
Let’s not forget that a product or service launch (or grand opening) is first and foremost a brand event. It exemplifies the brand mission. It defines the brand identity and the brand deliverables going forward. It announces to the world the new kind of customer that your brand intends to create. As the event unfolds, it will produce lasting perceptions and impressions, many with strategic consequences.
BAA and BA went through many dry-run scenarios before Terminal 5 opened, but the opening was still a “national embarrassment.” One reason may be that the opening was not treated as a brand event, with top-level brand team participation and direction. With so much at stake, who else would one put in charge? It’s the brand team’s job to see the company through the eyes of the customer, to discern threats to brand value and to envision the total brand process that the event represents. Functional groups have neither this responsibility, nor vision.
Rarely, one individual can control the unveiling of a brand. At most companies, the brand team must step in, and step up.
Identifying potential brand failure points
I define a potential brand failure point as follows: a company operation that alone or in combination can fatally damage the brand’s ability to create customers and sustain the business. These are big ticket items, not trivial symbols. We think of them as “points” because that makes them easier to identify and fix.
As the brand team lays out brand touchpoints of a new product or service it will gain insight into the potential brand failure points of the operation. Plot your touchpoints on a value grid and configurations of failure points will reveal themselves. Similarly, as you plot the customer brand path, the brand value nodes at key junctures may approximate brand failure points.
What you’re “a brand of” makes a difference
How a company defines its brand can make a company more—or less—vulnerable to brand failure points. An airline that defines itself as a “brand of transportation” will think of itself as airplanes, equipment and processes to move paying passengers from point A to point B. An airline that defines itself as a “brand of travel” will position itself closer to customers by definition, and should have far better control over potential brand failure points.
Points to remember
- A product launch or facility opening is always a potential brand failure point. That’s why we have beta programs, soft launches, dry-runs, scenarios and contingency plans. These should have heavy brand team participation (if not direction).
- Conventional brand approaches high on glitz and glamor often overlook brand failure points. Then it’s the CEO who takes the fall.
- Brand failure points can occur when a brand team aims at gilding perceptions rather than delivering brand value. Blinded by atmospherics, the team overlooks the fact that customers are creatures of substance.
Brand failure points can “break” customer experience
Another way to identity potential brand failure points is to ask if a particular operation or process has the potential to “break” the desired customer experience. “Break” is the operative word. Customers are forgiving—to a point. At an airport, mediocre food is tolerable. A slow baggage carousel is tolerable. Missing baggage is not.
Putting the brand team in charge
The only way to prevent brand failure points from undermining a business is to give the brand team the authority to deal with them up and down the line.
Structurally, we move the brand team from the media periphery to the core of business, which is where it belongs in the first place.
Identifying, managing and containing brand failure points is hard, grueling work for the brand team, often far outside their traditional comfort zone. Nevertheless, it has to be done.
Do it now, or pay the price later.
