COVER STORY

EMRAN KASSIM

Boeing Malaysia Airlines 777-200ER

Critical lessons
Dean 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

here 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

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OCTOBER 2014

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

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

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

COVER STORY

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

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
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

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

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OCTOBER 2014

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,

Dean Dacko, SVP,

head of marketing
& products,
Malaysian Airlines

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.

MAS

MH370 search hampered by lack of military cooperation

MAS

COVER STORY

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

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
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
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MAS

COVER STORY

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 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
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.
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