16 AsianAviation | OCTOBER 2014

There was one word that was sums up 2014 for Malaysian Airlines. Unprecedented. That was the word that was used over and over again, says Dean Dacko, SVP, head of

marketing & products, Malaysian Airlines (MAS).A Boeing 777 vanishing; a search and rescue

operation over thousands of kilometres, involving up to 26 countries; the sheer amount of media scrutiny MH370 was the number one story on CNN for seven weeks and there were over 300 reporters camped at Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA).

And it was unprecedented that was soon as we got through that one, we got hit again, says Dacko. Never before has a global organisation been challenged by two such major events in such a short time.

Rule books were being ripped up and rewritten. Dacko emphasises that loss of life is the single most challenging thing for any airline. Normally, there are

COVER STORY

three phases of an aviation event the incident, finding the plane and passengers and locating next of kin, and then gradually moving on this usually takes around ten days.

After 10 days we looked through the manual for day 11 it wasnt there. We tossed the manual out of the window and wrote our own. And weve been writing our own manual ever since. Its been a real challenge for MAS.

Dacko says that the sheer intensity of the event

was a severe test. Every single word we published or uttered became the subject of tables of experts on CNN. In that context, the reality is that you could be frozen but at the same time that is absolutely the thing you cant be.

Throughout all this, Dacko says that MAS knew it had one very clear task to take care of next of kin. Within seven hours on March 8th, it deployed 93 people to Beijing and 45 or so to KLIA.

In Beijing during the height of the exercise we had over a 1,000 people in four hotels, Dacko recalls. This was costing over US$1 million a day for almost two-and-a-half months. But that was our job, and we took it seriously because we knew that they were going through an event in their lives that most of us couldnt even imagine.

At the same time, there was an airline to run. MAS flies around 47,000 passengers a day on nearly 400 flights.

The emergency operations centre at KLIA was operating 24 hours a day in shifts. Things were so intense, youd have to get out and take a walk, Dacko says. And he would often see cabin staff break into tears. The thing that was so amazing was within 20 minutes they would be on aircraft with smile on their face, greeting passengers Ive got huge respect for those people.

At the same time, it was far from business as

Critical lessonsDean Dacko, SVP, head of marketing & product at Malaysian Airlines was at the centre of the storm in a tumultuous year for the beleaguered carrier, writes Colin Baker

Never before has a global organisation been challenged by two such major

events in such a short time. DEAN DACKO

SVP, head of marketing & products, Malaysian Airlines

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Boeing Malaysia Airlines 777-200ER

18 AsianAviation | OCTOBER 2014

usual. With MH370, I got the call at 5.30 in morning, and by 7.30, two hours later, we made a decision and I called my boss and said, listen, we have to take down every single media asset we have in the world.

At the time, MAS was building up for the MATTA Fair, a travel event in Malaysia in which MAS usually has more sales volume than at any other time of year. So we had a huge campaign and by 7.30 we had taken it all down.

In what has been, to say the least, a very unfortunate year, MAS was fortunate in that it had recently moved its IT infrastructure onto a cloud-based service.

In the seven weeks after MH370, there were 58 million mentions on MASs websites. We would have collapsed under that weight, Dacko says, matter-of-factly. There were also four separate cyber attacks, each one of which would have taken the entire IT system down.

But because we deployed into cloud, our server stayed up for the most part our organisation didnt know there was an issue.

Moving onto cloud was part of a business transformation that had been embarked on two years previously. As part of this, MAS had also created 16 different country sites, and this allowed it to monitor, engage and communicate with different audiences

around the world. After MH370, they were sending back hourly reports.

Basically this gave us a temperature gauge of what was happening in each market, so we could then react and deploy our communications based on what was happening in those individual markets. We didnt have that before.

The Wall Street Journal recently carried out a survey of response times to twitter among airlines around the world. MAS came second. 76% of responses were under 15 minutes.

Dacko stresses that MAS wasnt just reacting it had to develop a plan.

As it started to move towards some form of closure, MAS started looking at issues such as recovery and business continuity, brand recovery, and how to

introduce products and services back again.In the immediate aftermath, MASs webpage had

been reduced to a grey screen. Then the carrier published an advert in every major daily newspaper in the world, offering its condolences.

Then we had to get our story out. The story was spinning out of control, notes Dacko, pointing to the search and rescue operation and the reaction of China.

In the digital age, people want to hear from the people making decisions they want to hear from the CEO, says Dacko. MASs CEO is Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, a small, wiry, notoriously shy man. He went in front of the cameras to give MASs story. Its the last thing in the world he would want to do. But hes absolutely who he is. He has so much integrity, so much honesty. The public knew that he was not bullshitting us says Dacko. Thats who he is.

One of the other stories MAS wanted to get out was what it was doing to help next of kin. So, Anneliza Zaind, vice president customer care fronted a video talking about what it was like dealing with next of kin. Another YouTube video focussed on the MAS staff who acted as caregivers.

Again, MAS was helped by its digital transformation over the last couple of years. We had created an environment where we could do AB testing, explains

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It has long been suspected that the search for MH370 was severely hampered by the unwillingness of the various military establishments in the sensitive South China Sea region to share information with Malaysia Airlines (MAS).

Dean Dacko, SVP, head of marketing & products, MAS, says that the key issue the airline had to deal with was the almost total lack of information. When that plane disappeared at 1.34am, someone disconnected both the transponder and the ACARS ability on that plane. It was invisible.

MAS was reliant on the various military authorities for information. So when we asked, did you happen to see this plane, and they all went, Im not going to tell you, because I dont want to let you know what I know and dont know. So we werent getting any information. So at that point everybody started speculating and we were getting all kinds of information and some of it we could believe it, but we couldnt verify it. This was a critical issue: You couldnt report on it unless we could verify it.

Dacko recalls one incident that summed up the airlines predicament. On a Tuesday

afternoon [three days after the incident] we were sitting in the centre with all the heads of department and AJ [MASs CEO, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya] walked in. We were all watching CNN, which was showing the Chinese satellite images of a debris eld that they saw, so we were on the phone with all the navies and air forces and trying to get ships and planes there and AJ walked in and said I just got this really crazy phone call.

The person on the other end said: Im not going to tell you who we are, were not going to admit it, and well deny everything if you suggest that we said it to you. The message was that they were looking in the wrong place the airline had crossed over from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean.

So after a while we realised what that was about and it was the US military. They have these satellites in the air, for the most part focussed in on Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan.

In their peripheral vision they had seen something. They couldnt really tell you exactly where it was, but they knew that it was a UFO in an airspace where theres hardly anything there, especially not at 5am,

says Dacko.So we got that phone call, but we couldnt

verify it. And if we admitted it, theyd deny it. So we passed it on, but there were reams of that, so we getting all kinds of stuff that we couldnt verify.

MH370 search hampered by lack of military cooperation

But because we deployed into cloud, our server stayed up for the most

part our organisation didnt know there was an issue.

DEAN DACKO SVP, head of marketing & products, Malaysian Airlines

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SDean Dacko, SVP, head of marketing & products, Malaysian Airlines

AsianAviation | OCTOBER 2014 19

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Dacko, referring to a marketing tool for testing reactions to a web page. This enabled MAS to put out two adverts back-to-back and quickly gauge the public reaction. This allowed us to get the right look and feel very, very quickly, says Dacko.

Initially, MAS used just digital channels not newspapers where there were still reams of negative reports. Digital is also highly targeted, precise and flexible. If theres a negative reaction we can adjust it, says Dacko. Its also enabled MAS to be very personable in its communications. Then MAS started advertising in newspapers

In March and April, web bookings were understandably very quiet. Then in May, the carrier experienced its second highest month ever for web bookings. We were very buoyant, says Dacko. We never expected that wed be hit again.

Dacko recalls the moment he heard about MH17. Hed just got home from a dinner with colleagues. I was sitting on the couch and I looked at my phone. A text came up MH17 took off Amsterdam, on way

to KLIA, lost contact over Ukrainian air space. Were now code red, please return to KLIA.

I looked at the phone for probably two minutes in disbelief. I thought, theres no way, this can be happening. Its got to be somebodys cruel joke. But it was trueand we had to do it all over again.

But this time round things were different. Having gone through the first time, we were able to do it a lot better. We had more confidence. Wed seen what worked. One of the things wed learnt we could be more assertive, more direct in our communications.

There was one lesson in particular that helped. Every crisis management exercise weve seen in the world has been the same its basically been run by lawyers. And lawyers dictate what you can say, who you can say it to, what kind of words you can say. Its all about less is more, and its about being really slow and cautious, Dacko says.

Well, in the digital world, with audiences of hundreds of millions, their expectation is that they want to know now. They ask a question they want an answer. And what we saw with MH370 was that if you didnt give them the answer, it would linger, and it would grow. It would spiral out of control where people were speculating about why they werent answering they must be hiding something. It

in the digital world, with audiences of hundreds of millions, their expectation

is that they want to know now. They ask a question they want an answer. And what we saw with MH370 was that

if you didnt give them the answer, it would linger, and it would grow

DEAN DACKO SVP, head of marketing & products, Malaysian Airlines

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AsianAviation | OCTOBER 2014 21

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would just get bigger and bigger and bigger and became a much bigger issue.

So the whole notion of lawyers determining how to manage press communications was always to try and mitigate liability. The reality today is that by not communicating, by not being forthright, by not being engaged, the damage to your brand, the amount of money youll have to invest to get it back, is 10 or 50 times more than youll ever see with a lawsuit, says Dacko. You need to be engaged.

MAS was much quicker second time round. Yes the circumstances were different, but our confidence gave us the opportunity to move faster. It took us seven weeks [to retransition the website] with MH370, [with MH17] we did it in five days.

Dacko adds, We just looked smoother, we looked better prepared, we had a much better process of managing the crisis. One example is that the airline had to create a sub-site off its website. This took a week and a half with MH370. For MH17 it happened on the same day as the incident.

We then took the conversation about the event to a different site, away from our commercial environment. We shifted the conversation, shifted the attention. We did that on the first day. MAS also transitioned its entire website from being dark to fully commercially active in five days.

The social media recovery process started with stay strong, which actually originated from an internal message. The staff morale at MAS was pretty low. We were feeling pretty beat up, recalls Dacko. When we employed that message in our social media, it just exploded. As we moved forward, we wanted to move away, so the message became keep flying. That resonated well in all our social environments.

Dacko was speaking in mid-August at the Mega Event Asia-Pacific in Singapore, and MAS was planning its strategy for September. We started to

deploy different images around the world in the web environment you have to keep creative fresh. We would test in one market, and depending how they worked would deploy them in another market.

Amongst the celebrities helping MAS are singer/songwriter Yuna, fashion designer Jimmy Choo and former-Bond Girl Michelle Yeoh.

There has been some speculation about a name change, but Dacko is far from convinced that would be a good idea. The idea of becoming an LCC is a no-goer, given the presence of AirAsia. And MAS is known for its Malaysian hospitality its won awards for it, Dacko stresses. So why would you then trash that brand and invest millions and millions of dollars to create a new one?

In the third week of April, MAS carried out a study to try and understand what had happened with its brand. When we got the data back, it was pretty stark. Promoters went down and rejecters went up dramatically.

But globally, MH370 had 100% awareness. Prior to MH370, MAS as a brand had low single digit awareness around the world. Outside Malaysia there was not a lot of awareness.

After MH370 it went up to 85%, in the range of Coke and Pepsi so why the hell would you abandon that. Thats my view, states Dacko.

The reality today is that by not communicating, by not being forthright,

by not being engaged, the damage to your brand, the amount of money youll have to invest to get it back, is 10 or 50 times more than youll ever

see with a lawsuit DEAN DACKO

SVP, head of marketing & products, Malaysian Airlines

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