United Breaks Guitars

When Dave Carroll and his band, Sons of Maxwell, went on their week-long-tour of Nebraska, tragedy happened. The band boarded a United plane to fly from Halifax to Omaha with the assumption that their luggage and equipment would be safe with the honorable United flight staff. However, when the planed stopped in Chicago to make a connection Carroll heard the woman sitting behind him cry out “My God, they’re throwing guitars out there!” Unaware of what had been happening, Carroll and his band looked out the window to see the United Baggage handlers throwing around their bass and other instruments as if they were pillows. Carroll’s $3500 dollar Taylor guitar had already been thrown, and the neck broken.

After witnessing the destruction of his instruments, Carroll decided to take up his concerns with the United flight crew. However, they seemed to want nothing to do with his concern and kept telling him to “take it up with someone else”. After trying to speak with multiple employees several times with no help, Carroll and his band decided to take matters into their own hands, threatening that if United didn’t pay to replace his $3500 guitar he would release three songs telling the world his story. Neglecting to think anything of the threat, United continued to do nothing about the issue. That is where Carroll’s tragedy slowly turned to be a United tragedy.

Within 24 hours of posting the first video on YouTube, it received over 150,000 hits and instantly became viral. What United assumed to be just a stupid little threat actually soon became extremely detrimental to United and their stocks. Carroll’s guitar could have been replaced for $3500, but consequently because of United's public relations humiliation and mistake, their stock went down 10% costing the stockholders over $180 million in value.

This incident was a horrible public relations issue for United. Customer service and satisfaction is the first step in good public relations. The main concern for public relations professionals is to maintain a positive image for their client or company and when customers are not satisfied, that image instantly drops. United learned the hard way that even one unhappy customer has the potential to spread a very negative image around about your company.

Due to the results of Carroll’s instantly viral YouTube video, United had a lot of damage control to do to save their reputation and make customers want to continue to fly with them. However, even the way they went about their fix wasn’t the right move either. United contacted Carroll after the video had become a hit, offering him money to replace his damaged guitar, however it was too late. Carroll insisted that he had already given them enough chances to make up for what had happened, and he suggested it would be better to donate that money to a charity than to give it to him. United should have just owned up to their mistake and had a public apology.

Carroll went about this issue in an extremely smart way and as a result the publicity of his band went up along with their number of albums sold. Additionally, this situation made for great PR for Taylor guitars, who ended up giving Carroll two guitars and other props for his second video. Also, since then Carroll has been in great demand for speaking on proper customer service.

The video “United breaks Guitars” now has more than 10 million hits and continues to grow every day. Learning about this story and analyzing its effects has taught me a lot about PR and how important it is for the success of a company. I now more fully understand that it’s never a good idea to take any situation lightly, because in the end the costs will far outweigh the benefits.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo