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Just what was the significance of this incident to a brand like United Airlines? Could its scale have been anticipated or influenced? How, when, and how much could the brand have reacted? And looking forward, what contingency planning would be appropriate? Was this kind of incident the responsibility of brand management, customer service management, or media and public relations, or did responsibility lie elsewhere in the organization?

United Airlines

With close to 50,000 employees and more than 3,300 flights per day, United Airlines was one of the largest international airlines based in the U.S.5 Since deregulation of the industry in 1978, airlines had been unconstrained by pricing and scheduling mandates. Deregulation initially yielded profits for the airlines, but profitability soon gave way to cycles of losses.

In common with all major airlines, United Airlines struggled with competitive fare slashing and high fuel costs. In December 2002, United filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Its losses for the year totaled $3.21 billion. In 2003, it took further measures to trim operational costs, including a workforce reduction of 20%, renegotiation of salaries, and outsourcing of maintenance services, and its yearly loss decreased to $2.81 billion.6 The layoffs and cuts continued, with flight attendants and in-flight services bearing the brunt of the reduction. In 2006, United laid off 11% of its salaried workers,7 and in 2008 the airline announced it would no longer be handing out complimentary pretzels and biscuits to economy class passengers in North America.8 Shortly thereafter, the American Customer Satisfaction Index Airline Rankings for 1996–2009 were released. United’s score was the lowest, with the largest percentage drop in the 13 years of the survey (see Exhibit 1; United Airlines’ stock price is shown in Exhibit 2).

The Incident For more than 20 years, Dave Carroll had been making a modest living as a musician, performing

his brand of pop-folk music with his band, Sons of Maxwell. Carroll’s life as a working musician took him back and forth across Canada most years, into several U.S. cities, and sometimes to international destinations for music festivals. On March 31, 2008, Carroll and members of the band were flying from their hometown of Halifax, Canada, for a week of shows in Omaha, Nebraska. During a connection in Chicago, other passengers aboard the flight noticed some very rough handling of cargo, and Carroll’s bandmates watched helplessly as Dave’s $3,500 Taylor guitar was mishandled by United’s baggage handlers. Carroll shared his concerns with a flight attendant. He was told, “Don’t talk to me. Talk to the lead agent outside.”9 Carroll complied and was informed by the employee at the gate that he should take the issue up with the ground crew in Omaha. But the flight was delayed, and Carroll saw no ground crew when he arrived in Omaha after midnight.

On his return to the airport in Omaha, he spoke with a United agent, who advised him that he would need to start a claim at the originating airport, in Halifax. Once he was back in Halifax, Carroll was given a phone number that he called a few times, eventually being rerouted to a call center in India. Several calls later, Carroll was directed to United’s baggage offices in Chicago, where he was told that he would need to bring the guitar to Chicago for inspection. When Carroll explained that he was over 1,200 miles away from Chicago, the agent told him to go through United’s central baggage center in New York, which eventually led Carroll back to the call center in India.

To Carroll’s delight, the customer service manager in India promised to get in touch with a United representative in Chicago. He did so, and the representative reviewed Carroll’s file and made direct

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e-mail contact with him. It was now seven months since the process began, but Carroll felt that at last the matter was being addressed. When the email arrived, however, the representative said she was sorry about what had happened to the guitar, but that standard airline policy held that claims be made within 24 hours of damage (a precaution against fraudulent claims). She told him that his claim was going to be denied. Carroll asked to speak with a supervisor, but was refused. His final request was for $1,200 worth of United flight vouchers, the amount he had paid to repair his guitar. The representative told him no, United considered the case closed, and there would be no further communication on the matter. “At that moment,” wrote Carroll in his blog, “it occurred to me that I had been fighting a losing battle. . . . The system is designed to frustrate affected customers into giving up their claims and United is very good at it.” In his final exchange with the representative, he told her that he would be writing three songs with video about United Airlines and sharing them on YouTube. His goal, he said, was to get one million hits in one year.10

Carroll wrote the first song, and with his friends at Curve Productions in Halifax, produced a biting video to accompany it. The budget for the video was $150, with people donating time, props, and locations for the shoot.11 The location that stood in for the O’Hare airport tarmac was the fire station in Waverly, Nova Scotia, where Dave Carroll worked as a volunteer firefighter. On July 6, 2009, the video was posted to YouTube.

The Video Takes Off Carroll’s friend, Ryan Moore, posted the video to YouTube at about 10 p.m. on Monday, July 6.

Throughout the night and the following day, a small team of friends used Twitter to introduce their followers to the video. They also tweeted to those on Twitter who had themselves tweeted about bad experiences with United Airlines, and to members of the media including Jay Leno, Jimmy Fallon, and Perez Hilton. They posted the story to Digg and other social news sites to which people could submit stories and vote them up and down.

At 1:49 p.m. on Tuesday, July 7, the video was picked up by Consumerist.com, a website affiliated with Consumers Union, America’s leading not-for-profit consumer advocacy organization and the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine. That evening at 7:02 p.m., the story made its first mainstream news appearance in the travel section of the website of the Los Angeles Times. The reporter had seen the video when it was e-mailed to a colleague by a friend. The story reported that by that time the video had received 24,000 views and 461 comments, most of them maligning United Airlines.

On Wednesday, July 8, HuffingtonPost.com and NBCChicago.com relayed the story to their followers, and on that day there were 190,000 views on YouTube (see Exhibit 3). Mainstream media such as CNN, the CBS Morning Show, and Associated Press began calling Carroll for interviews, and on July 9 and 10 mainstream media mentions peaked at 150 and 155, respectively.

By Friday, July 10, YouTube views per day crested, with cumulative views reaching nearly 1.6 million. By this time “United Breaks Guitars” was YouTube’s number one rated music video of all time, and number three in any category of video.12 Beginning on July 23, a second surge in YouTube traffic arose when the British news media picked up the story. By the end of July, the video had been viewed 4.6 million times.

The popularity of “United Breaks Guitars” on YouTube spilled over to other online media. Traffic to Dave Carroll’s website, www.davecarrollmusic.com, on which he sold his CDs, surged from a few hundred unique visitors per week to more than 20,000 per week (see Exhibit 4). Song sales on iTunes

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increased from one or two per day to hundreds per day. “United Breaks Guitars” became a Top 20 iTunes download in Canada and the number-one country music download in the United Kingdom for July 2009.13 "My mother handles our mail-order,” said Carroll. “I went round there on Saturday and her couch was piled high with CDs ready to be mailed out. It was the third ‘couch full’. . . . We might have to hire someone to help her, or at least buy her a bigger sofa."14

On July 10, Bob Taylor of Taylor Guitars, the California-based manufacturer of high end guitars, posted a two-minute video on YouTube to express his support for Carroll and to offer advice on transporting guitars on planes. Taylor guitars were used by some of the top names in the music industry, among them Prince, Taylor Swift, and Aerosmith. In the description section of his YouTube video, Bob Taylor wrote, “Taylor has had an artist relationship with Dave for several years now. In 2006, our owners’ magazine, Wood & Steel, reviewed Dave’s CD, “Sunday Morning.” As we’ve had an ongoing relationship, we have made the offer to replace and/or further repair his damaged 710ce . . . we’ve offered Dave [as a Taylor artist] our support, a choice of a new guitar, and to re-repair the damaged 710ce. Dave and his bandmate Julian made the trip to the Taylor factory in July and have met many of our staff. We’ll also be running a story on Dave’s experiences in the fall issue of Wood & Steel.” In the video, Bob Taylor expressed his concern for Dave Carroll’s situation and went on to say, “If your guitar is broken and you had it in a hard shell case, there was clearly some negligence and abuse there, because the case can protect the guitar from all kinds of damage.”15

United Airlines’ Response

United Airlines had its own presence in both online and social media. Its website, like that of most commercial airlines, gave customers the ability to browse fares and schedules, make bookings, check their flyer miles balance, interact with customer service, file damaged baggage complaints, and view the latest news from the airline (see Exhibit 5 for more information on united.com). In July 2009, United maintained a presence on Twitter that had approximately 18,000 followers. United Airlines used Twitter actively, tweeting two or three times a day with information useful to travelers, such as Twitter-only airfare deals and system disruptions. All United employees were encouraged to monitor social media for mentions of United Airlines. All they needed to do to monitor tweets involving United Airlines was to subscribe to the service and search for mentions.

At noon on July 7, before any blogger or mainstream news medium had reported the story, and with cumulative views of Carroll’s video under 20,000, a United Airlines staff member read the following tweet from one of Carroll’s friends: “psssst . . . @UnitedAirlines breaks guitars! And they don't even care!” Minutes later, Robin Urbanski of United Airlines’ media relations team in Chicago called Rob Bradford, managing director of customer solutions at United, and told him, “We need to call Carroll.” The call was made, but Carroll was not available to return the call until the next morning. Urbanski then sent out United’s first tweet: “This has struck a chord w/us and we've contacted him directly to make it right.”

United Airlines tracked the Twitter conversation throughout the day and onward, joining the conversation many times and frequently tweeting the sentence, “This has struck a chord with us,” as new people joined the conversation. United would often have to state that it had reached out to Dave Carroll, as in this interchange:

 At 1:02 p.m., from a member of the public: “Check the @unitedairlines account. They've apologized and accepted responsibility. Cool stuff.”

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 At 2:28 p.m., from one of Carroll’s team: “word has it @UnitedAirlines isn't trying to make it right, they are just tweeting is that way.”

 At 2:31 p.m., from United Airlines: “The word you hear is wrong. We have called him and the person who answered his phone scheduled a call for tomorrow morning.”

United’s Rob Bradford reached out to Carroll on July 8 to apologize for the situation and to ask if United could use the video internally to help change its culture.16 He offered him $1,200 in cash, the amount Carroll had spent on repairing his guitar, plus $1,200 in flight vouchers. Carroll declined the offer and suggested that United give it to a customer of its choosing who had been affected in a similar way. The airline chose instead to donate $3,000 to a music school.

Meanwhile, the tweeting continued. United did not respond to taunting from Carroll’s friends:

 At 1:46 p.m., on July 7: “Why'd you guys have to go and break his guitar? http://bit.ly/rI2ef Stop being a bully and fess up!”

 At 3:40 p.m., on July 7: “Learn from the United Breaks Guitars song that its NOT ok to treat any customer bad.”

 At 9:50 p.m., on July 7: “You can say creatively that this has struck a chord with you but lets be real how do you plan on changing?”

 At 9:53 p.m., on July 7: “You realize that Dave Carroll is one of many people burned by your ‘Airline’ ~ how'd you plan to make things right 4them?”

 At 9:55 p.m., on July 7: “And since I'm on a roll, shame on you for taking over a year to bother . . . too much truth in your bad PR?”

On more than one occasion, however, United Airlines used Twitter to try to defuse the situation:

 At 3:00 p.m., on July 8, from Ryan Moore: “i posted a video for a client of mine monday night and it's like the biggest vid on youtube canada now. http://bit.ly.”

 At 3:39 p.m., on July 8, United Airlines replied: “Love your client's video. Not all r as honest as he. That is why policy asks for claims w/in 24 hours. No excuse; we're sorry.”

 At 4:56 p.m., on July 8, from a Twitter member: “I love this song about @unitedAirlines Check it out! http://bit.ly/8RDMI”

 At 5:02 p.m.. on July 8, from United Airlines: “It is excellent and that is why we would like to use it for training purposes so everyone receives better service from us.”

United Airlines continued to monitor references to the video and react to them:

 At 6:00 p.m., on July 9, from a musician in Cleveland: “Funny how @UnitedAirlines denies someone's claim until it's made public #UnitedBreaksGuitars—You COULD have made it right a year ago.”

 At 7:59 p.m., on July 9, United Airlines replied: “Absolutely right, and 4 that (among other things), we are v. sorry and are making it right. Plan 2 use video in training.”

Occasionally, United made comments about the incident that were not reactions to other Twitter members’ tweets:

 At 6:44 p.m., on July 10: “Wud like Dave 2 sing a happy tune—as asked we gave 3K to Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz 4 music education 4 kids.”

 At 6:46 p.m., on July 10: “Can’t wait 2 make music w/Dave 2 improve service 4 all.”

For the rest of the week, the Twitter feed served as the channel by which United responded:

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 At 9:34 a.m., on July 10, a Florida resident wrote: “United Breaks Guitars! LOL this is a funny vid! I hope you guys buy him another.”

 At 10:13 a.m., on July 10, United Airlines replied: “As Dave asked we donated 3K to charity and selected the Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz 4 music education 4 kids.”

 At 7:31 p.m., on July 13, a Twitter member commented: “The sad thing is, I still don't think @unitedairlines really gets what they did wrong.”

 At 3:56 p.m., on July 13, another member commented: “It should have been fixed sooner & not have happened in the 1st place.”

 At 11:24 a.m., on July 14, the airline replied: “Should it regretfully happen to anyone, pls file a claim w/in 24hrs at airport, online or phone.”

 At 6:45 p.m., on July 14, United Airlines continued: “That was a mistake that we made, have apologized for, have fixed, and most importantly, learned from too.”

United Airlines was selective in the media it used to discuss the incident. It responded to inquiries

from journalists about the incident, but did not address it on its website or its YouTube channel. It posted a comment to Carroll’s band’s YouTube channel, but the message was deleted. By August 2009, United was responding to tweets with direct messages (private communications through the Twitter medium) inviting a longer e-mail communication.

These emails came from Robin Urbanski in United’s media relations group and read:

Yes, these videos have struck a chord with all of us here.

In recent statements on YouTube, Mr. Carroll described our baggage service representative as a “great employee who acted in the best interests of the company,” and I could not agree more with that.

He has made his point, I have since been in contact with him to fix, and I am now his BFF.1

The second video is suggesting we do something that we’ve already done — and that is to provide our agents with a better way to escalate and respond to special situations.

While his anecdotal experience is unfortunate, the fact is that 99.95 percent of our customers’ bags are delivered on time and without incident, including instruments that belong to many Grammy award– winning musicians.