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First the backstory —
In Spring 2008, musician Dave Carroll took a United Airlines flight heading toward Nebraska for a 1-week tour. Due to carry-on bag restrictions, he had to check his $3,500 Taylor guitar. While sitting on the tarmac, another passenger brought everyone’s attention to the United Airlines baggage handlers who were throwing Carroll’s guitar (among other things) into the plane in a manner that left little hope for survival. After 9 months of phone calls and discussions with a myriad of United Airlines employees, Carroll was finally told that United Airlines would not compensate him for his loss. You can read the full story here.
So what did Carroll do? He turned to the power of the social web, namely YouTube, to share his story — and it worked!
Carroll wrote a song and filmed a video called “United Breaks Guitars” (which is very funny) and uploaded it to YouTube on July 9, 2009. You can view it below (or watch it here). As of today, not even two months since it’s release, the video has been viewed over 5.3 million times.
Word got out and the video became a big enough viral sensation that United had to respond. They contacted Carroll and offered to compensate him for the damages done to his guitar, but Carroll declined the money and asked United to donate it to charity. He uploaded a new video on July 10th in which he describes his discussion with United, which you can watch below (or view it here on YouTube).
On August 17, 2009, Carroll uploaded the second song and video in his 3-part United song series. As of today, just two weeks later, already nearly 300,000 people have watched the video, shown below (or view it here).
Carroll is now writing the third and final song in his United series, which will be released on YouTube with a corresponding video soon.
There are two things marketers must learn from this story. First, the social Web is a powerful tool with the potential to make or break a brand. Make it work for you, not against you. Second, United breaks guitars.
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Susan Gunelius
Susan Gunelius is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc. and Founder & Editor in Chief of an award-winning blog, WomenOnBusiness.com. She is a 25-year veteran of the marketing field and has authored 10 books about marketing, branding, and social media, including the highly popular 30-Minute Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing for Dummies, Blogging All-in-One for Dummies and Kick-ass Copywriting in 10 Easy Steps. Susan’s marketing-related content can be found on Entrepreneur.com, Forbes.com, MSNBC.com, BusinessWeek.com, and more. Susan is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company. She has worked in corporate marketing roles and through client relationships with AT&T, HSBC, Citibank, Intuit, The New York Times, Cox Communications, and many more large and small companies around the world. Susan also speaks about marketing, branding and social media at events around the world and is frequently interviewed by television, online, radio, and print media organizations about these topics. She holds an MBA in Management and Strategy and a Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing.
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I mentioned this story to my mother and she related a story about her sister, who was a flight attendant, seeing the baggage handlers for “her” airline abusing her new garment back on the tarmac in Minneapolis. It fell off a baggage trailer and was promptly, maybe intently, run over by another baggage trailer before being tossed into the plane. Needless to say some of the garments in the bag didn’t fare so well and her new bag tire marks all over it. She complained to “her” airline and they were as unresponsive to an employee as to a regular traveller. “Noooo, we couldn’t have done that…”, Aunt: “But we saw them do it”, “You must be mistaken, it couldn’t have been your bag”.
Scott, That story is crazy. So this utter disregard for customers’ property isn’t isolated to United nor is it isolated to customers only. Very sad and utterly inexcusable from a branding perspective.