Be careful with your communication!

Imagine the situation: Madrid airport, last week, the day before a long weekend. A low cost flight ready for boarding. Destination: Berlin. As an exception, the company has sent an e-mail to the passengers the very same afternoon accepting two pieces of hand baggage instead of only one with the aim of avoiding the inconveniences of a strike of the handling service personnel in Madrid airport. Apparently, they are exploiting the great advantages of nowadays instant communication as a marketing tool: there’s no doubt that making the trip easier and more comfortable seems a brilliant marketing action to promote customer’s loyalty. So far so good.

Soon problems appear, however: personnel in charge of boarding have not been warned by the company and therefore they stick to the rules, not accepting more than a piece of hand baggage. What’s more, they try to charge the official (and excessive) extra cost for additional baggage. At this moment, the cabin has run out of room to allocate more baggage.

I must say that my confidence in people’s goodwill has substantially improved since then (in fact, I couldn’t explain how the incident didn’t end up in a riot). Third world war will surely never happen.

And so, what originally was a brilliant marketing action soon badly backfired: one thing is finding yourself with the impossibility to board a piece of baggage in the cabin, but quite another is having announced the possibility to board two pieces and seeing them rejected at the very boarding queue to be put in the hands of the strikers.

Effective communication is not only about volumes of information, neither about its confection or audience analysis. It is much more a dangerous matter to be handled with maximum care at every detail, planning and controlling the whole cycle.

In these cases, intention is not what really matters.