Dean Dacko, a keynote speaker at the marcus evans CMO Summit 2014, on how Malaysia Airline’s digital capabilities helped the company navigate through the MH370 events

1. “A word that was used repeatedly to describe Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the events around it was
“unprecedented”. The disappearance of a modern Boeing 777, the size and scope of the search operations and the
scale of interest in the story were unprecedented,” explained Dean Dacko, SVP Marketing, Malaysia Airlines. A
keynote speaker at the marcus evans CMO Summit 2014, taking place in the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia,
18 - 20 August, Dacko said the impact on the company, country and drop in travellers in the region was even worse
than when SARS broke out.
Like every airline in the world, Malaysia Airlines had a manual and procedures for managing a crisis, but no amount
of preparation, training or experience could have prepared it for what Dacko referred to as the greatest mystery in
aviation history.
“With no wreckage from the aircraft, within ten days the manual was virtually irrelevant and we had to start writing
our own. We managed the crisis while every media agency in the world was reporting on the story, police agencies
were investigating, and we continued carrying 47,000 passengers a day in 400 flights.”
How the airline leveraged its capabilities for monitoring social media sites and engaged people provides valuable
lessons for Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) everywhere, Dacko highlighted. “We monitored what was being said
and how the market was reacting to what we did. In seven weeks, there were 58 million posts on our various sites.
When the spotlight is so intense, it can freeze even the most capable people, as anything they do will have both a
positive and negative impact. For us to move in a compassionate yet proactive manner, we needed intelligence on
what was being communicated around the world. Having a state-of-the-art digital communications capability built-in
before MH370 allowed us to move forward.”
Within seven hours, Malaysia Airlines was able to transition to an environment where every commercial message on
its website was stripped away, presenting MH370 information in text only for 40 days. Subsequently, it progressively
transitioned back to being commercially active in the marketplace, without offending the families of the passengers
or crew. “It took Air France, which was probably the most similar situation to MH370, more than a year to make the
transition back to a formally commercial environment, while we did it in less than two months. We suffered
significant forward-booking reduction in the period we were virtually black from a promotional standpoint, but we
turned that trend around in two months to the point of achieving the second largest revenue month on our direct
booking channels in the entire history of the airline in May.”
Dacko concluded: “What made Malaysia Airlines successful was the recognition that being silent in the marketplace
was not commercially acceptable. We needed to move forward while being highly sensitive to the environment we
were in. Our strategy was to move, measure and adjust, and we did that with every point of sale we have worldwide
and every message that was communicated. Throughout the entire process, we never had a situation where we had
to move backwards or take down a message, although we were prepared for that. We seemed to be able to
anticipate exactly the right thing to say at the right time from a commercial standpoint.”
What CMOs can Learn from Malaysia
Airline’s Management of the MH370 Crisis
Dean Dacko, a keynote speaker at the marcus evans CMO Summit
2014, on how Malaysia Airline’s digital capabilities helped the company
navigate through the MH370 events.
Interview with: Dean Dacko, SVP Marketing, Malaysia Airlines

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About the CMO Summit 2014
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