Survey claims 'crash' in QF's reputation

[Melburnian1]

Many of us take surveys with a grain of salt, even if they are conducted by bona fide market research companies.

AMR has just publicised its annual corporate reputations rankings.

Air NZ ranked 7th (up four places compared with 2013) of 60 companies according to surveyed consumers, Virgin Australia 8th (down from 7th) and Qantas 26th (down 13 places compared with a year ago).

Flight Centre came in at 16th, down two from 2013, just beating Wesfarmers (owner of Coles, Target and K Mart) and Woolwoths (who also own numerous pubs with electronic gaming machines, Dan Murphy's and BWS liquor retailers).

JB Hi-Fi was top of the pops followed by Australia Post, and then surprisingly Mazda, Toyota, Nestle and the Good Guys.

ING Direct was 12th and Bendigo and Adelaide Bank was 13th but other banks fared poorly: ANZ 32nd, Westpac 39th and NAB 40th while the largest of the lot, Commonwealth bank was nowhere to be seen. Macquarie was 46th.

Fairfax and New Corp were 57th and 60th, at the bottom, probably because so many Coalition supporters dislike Fairfax while lefties dislike News Corporation. This may tell us that the survey was completed by more Labor and Greens supporters than Coalition and Palmer party (PUP) supporters.

I prefer VA to QF but I doubt that I'd place VA in the top 10 for reputation of Australian corporate entities. Its fares on a standalone basis are often fairly expensive, particularly at peak times such as Fridays and Sundays. That may be rational behaviour by it, but it doesn't endear it to me, notwithstanding that both VA and QF are loss making businesses.

A media article today attributed QF's fall to its decision to sack 5000 employees.

Strangely, prominent airlines such as SQ and EK did not rate a mention from what I could see. Neither have standalone Australian domestic operations, but they nonetheless have popular Internet sites and a respectable share of air passenger traffic into and out of Oz. Similarly AirAsia (and for the wrong reasons, Malaysia Airlines) are prominent, as are Tiger and Jetstar. Perhaps the latter two ranked so far down the list that no story about 60 companies could feature them.

Because this is a national survey, there were no rankings for State based transport operators such as Sydney Trains, Metro in Melbourne, Queensland Rail or TransPerth. Nor did airline Rex feature, while none of the airports such as Sydney Airport or APAC in Melbourne rated a mention.

See today's 'AFR' for further details.

 

[medhead]

unbelievable that you can link these results to the political views of the respondents. Unreasonable assumption, IMO.

 

[Melburnian1]

medhead, it is a fact that many Coalition supporters intensely dislike the Fairfax press (and the ABC, which was not mentioned in the rankings) for good reason.

However in the thread above I was concentrating on airlines' rankings, as this is an aviation thread.

It was also surprising that airlines such as CX didn't feature, as that's one quite well known international carrier that has a pretty good reputation.

Interestingly, a good reputation may not mean good or increasing profits. For structural reasons, Australia Post's profit has been declining, while as noted above, QF and VA makes losses.

 

[medhead]

That's a fact is it? More likely a massive assumption on your part. Certainly there is no basis to claim, as you did, that more ALP/Greens voters responded than Coalition/PUP voters. It's a laughable conclusion to draw. If you were concentrating on airline rankings you never would have drawn such a false conclusion. I'm not even going to bother with this forced attempt to correlate reputation and profit.

 

[JohnK]

Take surveys/polls with a grain of salt.

Just like the best airline in the world. Huh!