The recent aviation disruptions have reignited an important conversation across marketing, strategy, and reputation management circles: what happens to a brand when the core promise it is built on collapses in real time?
In high-dependability sectors, where customers choose a service primarily for reliability, operational consistency is not just a functional expectation; it is a key contributor to brand equity. When that breaks, the impact is felt immediately across perception, trust, and long-term positioning.
Industry experts share a common view: operational stability and brand strength are more connected than ever.
Gopa Menon, COO and Co-Founder of Theblurr, says the effect is direct and immediate.
“For a brand like Indigo, whose entire identity is built on ‘on-time’ efficiency, an operational collapse strikes directly at its valuation. In high-dependability sectors, brand equity is synonymous with reliability. When planes don’t fly, trust evaporates faster than market cap. When operations falter at scale, the damage extends far beyond immediate revenue loss. Indigo’s troubles reveal how quickly reliability the cornerstone of airline brand equity erodes when service delivery breaks down consistently. Passengers don’t just switch carriers; they fundamentally reassess the brand promise.
The critical lesson here is that operational resilience is brand building. You can’t spin-doctor a stranded passenger. Long-term positioning suffers when customers start pricing in ‘uncertainty’ alongside the ticket fare. Brands must realize that in a crisis, your infrastructure speaks louder than your PR. Fix the operations first, and the reputation will follow.”
Harish Bijoor, Business & Brand-strategy specialist and Founder of Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., emphasises how such incidents affect the very foundation of brand value
“Both brand valuation and positioning are matters of perception. These are mind assets, and the moment an airline compromises its positioning, it risks everything. When you’re dealing with perception, you’re essentially playing with fire. It’s important to remember that a brand is a thought — a belief that lives in a person’s mind. And once that thought shifts, it can reshape both the positioning and, eventually, the valuation of the brand.”
From a crisis and policy lens, Dilip Cherian, Principal Protagonist and Litigation Landscaper at Dilip Cherian Associates, highlights how operational breakdowns create lasting memory in the public mind.
“Operational failures are actually a major cause of brand damage when the promise of the brand includes elements like safety or punctuality as aspects that the consumer can expect on a consistent basis, failure on any of these counts is usually brand-impacting. We’ve seen and worked with this.
Just like the Air India crash, which resulted in a huge loss of life, will stigmatize the airline for a long time, so also the 1000-flights-canceled-day will linger in public memory for a long time for Indigo.
It is much worse because the airline is now publicly suspected of having violated the protocol of the process of changing over to the new norms that pilots are expected to maintain. Whether it’s the board, the brand, or the bosses, the fact is that what the public will remember is that they all collapsed simultaneously and almost in a deliberate show of defiance to government.”
Adding a customer-behaviour perspective, Rajat Sethi, Consultant – Management Strategies, points out how quickly customer equity erodes.
“Operational failures, in any organisation, directly impact ‘customers’. The foundation of any service oriented business is customer satisfaction and if that gets impacted due to poor service or operational failures, then it directly erodes customer equity! Acquiring a customer is difficult as it is, specially for Airlines…but winning back a customer after a negative experience is very difficult. In Marketing we call it the law of the nth transaction…it does not matter how good you’ve been earlier, but it’s the last experience the customer has had with you, is what stays!”
For companies operating in dependability-driven categories, the takeaway is clear: operational resilience is not an internal metric; it is the backbone of long-term brand value.
In the end, the episode serves as a reminder that brand strength is not built only through marketing, visibility, or scale, but through the everyday reliability that customers quietly count on. When that consistency breaks, the narrative shifts quickly and recovery depends less on communication and more on rebuilding confidence through steady performance. For brands operating in trust-heavy sectors, the path forward is simple but demanding: protect the promise, invest in resilience, and ensure that operations and reputation move in step—because one cannot hold without the other.
