The top management has bitten the bullet and in this moment of great embarrassment they have talked about “forget and forgive” for the pilots. The statement made by the management has all the expected lines of “back together as one family” … ”will work together” and also a one line apology to the customers.

Now here is my point, whatever happened in those meeting rooms, a lot has happened outside. Pilots and Management might be too involved in this tug of war to think about anything else, but the reality is that there were thousands of helpless customers suffering out there, and thanks to the media, millions of the potential customers watched them. These are the people who were missing there exams, meetings, connecting flights, functions every day, or otherwise who burnt their hard earned money on purchasing last minute tickets from other opportunist airlines. Will they ever forgive and forget about this?

I believe it’s time for Jet to seek that “forgive and forget” from its customers. I would like to see an honest account by the management about this, and an explanation of why I can now believe that such things will not happen again in future. Doing something of that sort will require real guts and will actually show that the family is finally back. Till then, for me it’s a company in constant troubles, and when makemytrip throws those dozens of results in my flight search, I won’t mind spending a few hundred extra or travelling half an hour before if I can avoid them.

It is extremely difficult to build a brand, but as such incidents will show, it’s so easy to lose it all.
Jet is not all about the management, Pilots or the ground staff, yeah maybe the physical Jet is all about them, but the real Jet ..the brand , it lies with the public. And while it is easy to bring those few physical aspects back in shape, like to get the planes back in Air and back on schedule, it will be a gigantic task to regain that mind space among millions of people.

Michael Eisner, CEO Disney said this about a brand
“A brand is a living entity – and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures”

So those thousand small gestures of last decade could well get undone by this one major setback.
Let’s see!

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