Did IndiGo build enough goodwill to withstand a crisis?
If a brand is just the sum of every experience people have with it, then whatever you build in peacetime becomes the only defence you have in wartime. Peacetime is quiet. It is routines forming, expectations settling, and trust being built in small, uneventful moments. You rarely notice it at the time. You only realise its value when something goes wrong.
Maggi is the clearest example of this. When the safety crisis hit, the brand should have collapsed. But people did not turn away. They hesitated. There was a sense of “this can’t be right.” And that came from years of the brand being part of everyday life. It was ‘comfort’. It was childhood. It was ‘familiarity’. That kind of goodwill builds slowly but shows up loudly when it matters.
IndiGo’s peacetime work looked very different. The brand was not trying to create warmth. It was trying to create order. And for years, it did that well. It built trust, but in a more practical way. The kind of trust that says, ‘they will get me there on time’. Which is why the recent disruption felt sharper than usual. The failure hit the one place the brand had staked its entire identity on.
And you see, the way they are handling the recovery reflects that. No emotional messaging, no softening of the moment through sentiment. They do not have the emotional capital for that. So they’ve chosen clarity instead. Updates, dashboards, leadership visibility. Information as reassurance. A rational fix for a rational brand.
But here is where it gets a little tricky. IndiGo will probably walk away from this without too much business damage. And that is not because the brand is unusually resilient. It is because the category does not give people many exits. India’s aviation market is small in terms of choice. The people who are angry today will still fly the same routes next month. Not out of loyalty, but out of necessity.
And that raises a bigger question. What does a brand learn when the crisis does not show up in the numbers? Does IndiGo assume it is trusted? Or does it recognise that trust looks different when people stay because they do not have a choice. You see, dependence can feel like loyalty, but it is not the same thing. And it disappears quickly when the category opens up.
That is the real lesson for other brands. Peacetime is where you build the emotional buffer that helps you when things break. Wartime exposes whether that buffer exists at all. IndiGo perfected efficiency, but efficiency does not cushion you. It becomes the standard people expect. Goodwill comes from something else, something slower, something a little more human.
IndiGo’s wartime moment did not break the brand. But it did reveal how thin the emotional foundation is beneath all that operational discipline. The operations will recover. The question is whether the relationship will.
Note : All views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of AdTech Today.
