An airline went bust in America a few weeks ago. A budget carrier, cheapest seats in the sky, gone more or less overnight. Thousands of people woke up at the wrong end of the country holding tickets to nowhere.
What interested me was what happened next. Rival airlines stepped in. Capped fares, cheap rescue tickets, help getting the dead airline's own crews home. The marketing commentary called it genius PR. A free trial for stranded customers. Probably a tax write-off too.
Maybe. But I think that reading misses something, and the miss is the interesting bit.
You can do the right thing and have it be good for business. The two aren't in opposition. The question that actually matters is whether you'd have done it anyway, with nobody watching. Some of those airlines would have. You can usually tell, and so can the passengers.
We had our own version of this. When Thomas Cook collapsed, nobody afterwards talked about its advertising. The whole story was people at departure gates finding out from the news, and then whether they got home. Years of brand-building gone, and the thing that survived in memory was who helped.
I think about this in our own trade more than I'd like to admit. We can't out-advertise the big investment platforms. Their marketing budget is bigger than our whole firm. So we don't compete there at all. The plan, such as it is, is to be the ones who turn up when someone is stranded. Not on a runway. In a decision. A death, a redundancy, a week when the markets are ugly and the phone feels heavy.
Most of what we do is deliberately boring. Structured, repeatable, on time. That's not the opposite of the generous moment. It's what pays for it. You can only afford to drop everything for someone if everything else runs without drama.
I have versions of this conversation often, usually after the difficult bit has passed. Nobody ever mentions the paperwork. They remember who picked up the phone.
I don't know how you'd put that in an advert. I'm not sure you'd want to.