Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [49]
This cost-cutting culture was ultimately blamed for creating the environment that resulted in QF1 skidding so disastrously off the end of the runway in Bangkok in 1999. That incident brought the question of cost-cutting into the public eye for the first time and led to the questions about safety and maintenance that have dogged Qantas for the last decade.
In addition to cost-cutting, a significant weapon in the Qantas armoury was its advertising campaign with the children from the Australian Girls Choir and National Boys Choir singing ‘I Still Call Australia Home’. One of Dixon’s closest friends, advertising guru John Singleton, took a call from Dixon one Christmas morning asking him if he had seen the choir on Carols By Candlelight. He wanted Singleton to put them at Uluru, on the Brooklyn Bridge and in front of Big Ben singing the heart-stirring Peter Allen song. It cost $3 million but was the defining ad of the Sydney Olympics when it first aired in 2000, helping to steal the thunder from official carrier Ansett. ‘He’s a genius. I mean it, he understands far and beyond what makes all aspects of the company work,’ said Singleton.20
It was a good ad, but the battle with Ansett was far from over. It should also be noted that Singleton, who at the time of the comments was dining with Dixon on a weekly basis, had felt the savagery of his business acumen when he axed Singleton’s agency from the Ansett account. However, he gave Singleton the Qantas account when he started working there. He also hired Sydney chef Neil Perry to create the first- and business-class menus, combating the tired old jokes about airline food by getting a celebrity chef to attach his name to the Qantas brand.
There were other examples of Dixon’s uncanny marketing nous. When the new Airbus A380 came on line he called in brand expert Hans Hulsbosch, the designer responsible for rebranding Woolworths, and sent him to the Airbus factory in Toulouse to see if there would be a problem with using the famous flying kangaroo logo on the new planes. Hulsbosch walked back into his office two weeks later and placed on Dixon’s desk a hand-drawn cartoon of a kangaroo sitting in a wheelchair with its legs amputated. ‘What better way to explain it to a CEO? They have a million things going on in their heads, so you have got to hit them between the eyes, it makes them instantly focus on what you are doing,” said Hulsbosch.21 The problem was that, unlike older jets, the entire rear stabiliser on the tail of the A380 moved up and down, effectively slicing off the legs of the traditional kangaroo. ‘We would have had a national icon without any legs. That’s why it had to change,’ said Hulsbosch.22 He said it took him ten minutes to redraft the kangaroo with its legs forward to avoid the moving stabiliser. But that was the easy part. The new kangaroo then had to be redrawn and applied to the whole Qantas fleet, plus every single branded Qantas item – stationery, baggage carts, napkins, you name it. Just designing the new look is estimated to have cost Qantas $2 million – implementing it cost a great deal more.
Another Dixon marketing coup was to sign up Hollywood star John Travolta as a Qantas ambassador. The plane-mad actor had his own vintage Boeing 707 and lived at a pilots’ resort in Ocala, Florida, which had a double garage for two jets and, instead of a driveway, a runway that could land a 747 jumbo jet. Travolta explained during a 2004 promotional tour for the movie The Punisher how the unlikely partnership came about: ‘I went to them and said, “I love your airline, it has a perfect safety record for 84 years and I would like to be part of it somehow,” and they came up with the ambassador idea. They offered me to get my 747 wings and I did then I flew around the world twice for them and I enjoyed every second of it. I love being their ambassador.’23
Travolta, the self-confessed airline geek,