Pinnacle Insights
Zooming out with the airline bosses
June 24, 2009 | Written by Will Hardie
“Zoom in, zoom out” is one of the simplest and most effective media training tactics. It is almost always easier and more effective to talk about concrete details and examples (zoom in) or the big picture (zoom out) than the middle ground, which is where hard questions and challenging issues often begin. It’s about reframing an issue, without avoiding it.
Stelios Haji-Ioannou, founder of budget airline EasyJet, gave a great example of this in a BBC radio panel discussion this week. The topic had turned to environmental criticism of airlines as fast growing producers of greenhouse gases. There was some technical discussion about efficiency and technology, and then Stelios came out dropped this line:
“The world would be a more dangerous place without air travel.”
He went on:
“I think we have to remember that travel is good. fundamentally travel improves this w0rld. It makes the world safer, makes the world a better place. we understand each other’s culture, we are less likely to go to war.”
Hard to disagree with that — and more importantly, it addressed the debate at the visceral, emotional, principled level where the environmental lobby has most resonance. When your critics are saying “save the world”, there’s only so much you can do by saying “but our planes are are 10% more efficient.”
Steve Ridgway, CEO of Virgin Atlantic Airways, also zoomed out nicely with these lines:
“The global economy exists because of the jet engine.”
“Aviation will be the midwife of a lot of globalised recovery.”
On the same panel was Digby Jones (veteran voice of UK business, former CBI chairman, now Sir and Baron) — who I would normally rank as one of the top 10 spokespeople in the world, but was uncharacteristically off form. Contrast Stelios’ reasoned balance with Digby’s polarising approach, telling “tree-huggers” that they can’t resort to the arrogance of telling people not to fly. I would normally be firmly on the business side of the argument here, but that line alienated me and I suspect a lot people in the middle ground.
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/bottomline/bottomline_20090618-2031a.mp3
or if they take that one offline, there’s a copy on our server too:
