If the purpose of last month’s Planet 2010 expo was to give the public image of the telecommunications industry a shot in the arm, I suspect its architects will be disappointed.

That the industry gets a bad press is no secret. It’s a global issue, not just a New Zealand one. There are many reasons. Some are inevitable. For example technology, as we all know, can be fickle, yet the more of it we experience the less patient we are when it lets us down. Telecommunications is mostly the province of big corporations, so the perceived imbalance of power and helplessness of the individual consumer adds to frustration.

So bringing out an astronaut, no matter how famous, and filling Sky City with glitzy technology, was never going to make much of a dent in the core problem. If the top people in the industry want to make the public love them and their companies, they have to take a very different tack. Indeed, a handful are already doing so.

On the positive side, look at Telecom as a role model. Battered by the catastrophic XT outage, it set off on a damage control exercise. Paul Reynolds personally fronted the public, while Chris Quin and his Gen-i team kept corporate customers up to date every step of the way. As a case study in crisis management from a communications perspective it was masterful. By talking openly and frankly, Telecom’s leaders turned the issue around. Instead of Telecom being the villain and customers the victims, people started to empathise with Telecom.

None of that is absolute – the XT outage was inexcusable. Telecom will rightly wear the backlash. But in terms of its image, my sense is that what was destined to be a catastrophic collapse of the brand was contained.

Contrast that with the actions of other players. Vodafone couldn’t wait to plunge a knife into Telecom as quickly and deeply as possible – even while the happy families Planet 2010 was in progress. It offered to reimburse customers for their disconnection fees if they moved to Vodafone. Meanwhile CallPlus, with breathtaking cheek, incurred the wrath of the usually moderate consumer advocate David Russell with its public advice to XT customers to take Telecom to the Telecommunications Disputes Resolution Scheme – despite the fact that while Telecom offers its customers protection by being a member, CallPlus itself does not.

And looking back to the formation of the Telecommunications Industry Group I recall that the CEOs of Telecom and Vodafone still had one another’s fingerprints on their palms from the launch function, when Vodafone took High Court action over mobile interference. So what’s the lesson? I think there are three.

First, if you want a perfect public image, get into something other than telecommunications – in this controversial, adversarial, fast-moving sector the absolute, unconditional love of your customers is an unattainable goal.

Second, you can’t fix public image problems by throwing money at them. Remember the Gattung era at Telecom when the answer to bad press was to saturate the TV screens with more photos of cutesy little animals? It just didn’t work – the public are not stupid.

Third, and most seriously: the best thing the TIG could do is to look at a code of conduct for its own members. I understand the temptation to make the most of a competitor’s misery, but I’m not sure Telecom’s competitors did themselves any favours long-term with their long knives.

Maybe there should be an industry ethic that when a network goes down, the competitors’ first phone call is not to the advertising agency to take the maximum competitive advantage. Instead, it should be to the CEO whose company has the problem, offering some quiet help behind the scenes. That would be a sign of real maturity which would do far more than a speech from an astronaut from long ago.