A YouTube video went viral when a hopeful new country singer, Dave Carroll, sang about how United Airlines broke his guitar. About a year later with almost ten million views on YouTube, Carroll is now famous while United Airlines has a bad reputation they need to try and turn around.
Carroll was waiting for his plane to take off for Chicago when he noticed his guitar case was being thrown around by the baggage worker. Landing in Chicago, he found his guitar was broken. After he received little help from the United employees, he let the issue rest for about a year before creating his popular song/video, “United Breaks Guitars.” Carroll became very well-known and United lost a lot of respect from the American people. Not only did Carroll make one video, he made two others to go along with it.
You may point the blame at United Airlines, or think Dave Carroll was wrong for what he did. Either way, public relation professionals needed to be involved to alert the public on the situation, and in United’s case, find the right words to turn their bad reputation slowly into a good one.
In my opinion, I thought what Carroll did was a creative way to show United that they cannot get away from what happened, and a great way to catch their attention. I do think that making three videos on the matter was a bit extreme, one definitely sufficed. Carroll brought to United’s attention some issues they needed to fix and hopefully put into perspective for them the areas that needed the fixing. Whether Carroll had intentions of this video causing this much uproar or just thought it would be a good song, it undeniably caught the eye of most Americans.
After the second YouTube video was released, United put out a decent statement about their thoughts on the situation. I assume that because of this statement, United was not affected as badly as it was with the first video. They also put out some statistics showing that breaking luggage is not something that typically happens at United Airlines. I think United was right in putting out this statement along with the statistics in order to defend themselves, but action should have been taken long before a video ever came out.
United’s policy did not allow them to give Carroll a new guitar, but they should have offered their apologies and given him a free flight or some other perk. They also should have trained their baggage employees a little better and taken action to suspend or terminate the employees who were rough with Carroll’s guitar.
If I were in the shoes of United’s public relation professional, I would have asked a top official in the company to write an apology letter to Carroll. I believe that Carroll would not have created such havoc if he had been treated nicely whether he got perks or not. I would have also made a statement to the public addressing this issue and present ideas for what United wanted to do to prevent something like this from happening again.
United lost a lot of money with this case and could have stopped it from happening with the correct public relation message and action.
Good thoughts. I agree with what you, I think most of this incident could have been avoided if he had been treated better early on.
ReplyDeleteAubry, I enjoyed reading your case study. You make an excellent point in the second to last paragraph when you suggest that a top official simply write an apology. I can't believe that I never thought of that. I'd be willing to bet that most people had the opinion that the guitar absolutely should have been replaced when we really underestimate the power of a simple, genuine, apology.
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