Originally Posted by
Andriyko
Reputation means different things to different people. Obviously, for people who associate flying with food the fact that BA may stop giving any for free will mean a bad thing. As far as I can see it I might as well complain when a restaurant does not do my dry-cleaning when I go for dinner. Other airlines lost their reputation because their hard product sucked and they had/still have some of the most disinterested employees. Food had nothing to do with that. It is because BA was so far ahead and introduced a flat bed in business class that other airlines were behind. And these airlines lost their reputation in premium classes, not in economy. But premium classes are different. I don't think that in economy there is any difference, unless, of course, one really wants to make a point and say that crisps amount to full service.
There have been many posts on this thread on whether BoB will lead to reputational damage or not, and you are of course welcome to continue that debate, but my post which you quoted was not one of them. It simply stated a research finding (which, in fairness will be well known to many people aware of the relevant bodies of literature, but I suspect many people on FT have no reason to be) that it takes less to damage a reputation than to salvage it, and that negative reputational effects last much longer than positive ones.
It is just a point of fact which I thought was interesting in the context of people discussing reputation here, and from that point of view, it makes absolutely no difference if the negative reputational stimulus is related to food, seats, airports, a personal negative experience, a murder on a flight, a tragic accident, or a boss or manager being embroiled in some sort of tabloid scandal or anything else. If any of those stimuli do not lead to negative evaluation on your part then, great there is no effect, but if this is above your personal threshold for negative effect, then it will take a much stronger stimulus and much more time to reverse the effect.
For those interested, there are interesting effects in terms of brain waves - you can have an EEG of someone watching positive news and it is totally unaltered, then you put what represents bad news to them and their EEG suddenly goes totally crazy.