All of which has resulted in SAA's sole shareholder - Government - calling for an extraordinary meeting tomorrow, Tuesday, 10 February 2009, to discuss allegations against SAA CEO Khaya Ngqula and his senior management.
One has to feel some sympathy for SAA's plight, because whatever it seems to do, rightly or wrongly, it faces a barrage of criticism of a magnitude very few businesses in South Africa have ever experienced. And its only hope to avoid this in future is to use some creative marketing.
It has done it before and it has worked.
The problem is that being a wholly owned state entity, SAA is constantly under the spotlight from Parliament. It is constantly being watched by myriad organizations, representing the taxpayer, that scream blue murder every time is looks as though the taxpayers' money is being wasted. Unfortunately, due to heavy losses and other indiscretions, the situation has got the point where everything that SAA does is perceived to be wasteful, dodgy or downright dishonest.
Including sponsoring Argentine golfer, Angel Cabrera, to promote SAA's new route between SA and Argentina. Under normal circumstances not a bad marketing idea at all. But, right now, probably not a good idea because there are many that will see this as a complete waste of money when SAA can't afford to waste money. Not to mention, of course, the fact that Tiger Woods and General Motors (GM) ended their sponsorship agreement due to GM being in a bit of a financial pickle. Something that has set something of a troubled-times sponsorship precedent.
But, just how can SAA counter all these problems? How can it survive these crises and start being able to be run as a business without senior management having to spend every waking hour putting out fires?
Quite simply, it needs to stop having to defend everything it implements and use some creative marketing to ensure transparency and avoid controversy.
It has done it before, very successfully.
A few years ago, when Victor Nosi was VP of marketing at SAA, the airline had to select a new advertising agency. Aware of the fact that if all sorts of criteria were not met in the process, not least of all the BEE component, not only Parliament but the ad industry and heaven knows who else would raise an almighty stink.
In fact, at the time it was pretty much agreed by SAA management that, whatever the outcome, they were bound to take flak from the ad industry with regard to the pitch process and this would certainly escalate to Parliament.
So, they sought a marketing solution. Quite simply, the selection process was overseen by an independent marketing team led by Johanna McDowell and during the process, each stage was monitored by the ACA, the Marketing Federation of SA and other independent industry representative bodies.
The result was that the SAA advertising account was awarded to the best contender and not a single word of criticism was levelled at SAA afterwards.
One would have hoped that SAA would have learnt from this. Unfortunately not.
What SAA should be doing right now is certainly not buckling to outside pressure and cancelling all of its sponsorships, advertising and promotional activity. That would be suicide.
Perhaps the first step would be for SAA to conduct a very simple independent marketing audit to see which activities are efficient and valid for the current environment and which aren't. Quite apart from this being a sound business practice, it would give SAA the ammunition to fire back against any criticism of its marketing.
Essentially, what SAA should understand that no matter how careful it is in selecting suppliers and awarding tenders, unless safeguards against controversy are built in before the process stakes place, there will always be controversy.
Marketing is not just about advertising and big ideas, dancing girls and sponsoring golfers. It is essentially about governance. It is in itself a checklist to ensure that ROI and other measurements are included in advance and that elements are included to ensure that wrong perceptions are not created.
There are thousands of precedents for this solution. SAA simply needs to take a step back and reflect on the fact that its marketing effort should not just be aimed at filling airline seats but that it should have the added value of eliminating impropriety and nipping problems in the bud before they become such time-wasting issues.
