United Breaks Guitars
The “United Breaks Guitars” case is a special case that I was introduced to in my marketing class (HADM 2410) for the importance of customer service and how a little attention can go a long way in marketing. I found it very interesting and very relevant to the topic of networks and how one thing can spread to a giant network rapidly.
After nine months of calls and emails to United Airlines, David Carroll, a professional country artist, was told that he would not be compensated for his damaged guitar. Nine months before, Carroll had ridden a United Airline plane when workers mismanaged his $3500 Taylor guitar. He repaired it for $1200 of his own money and was never compensated by the airline. He made a YouTube music video titled “United Breaks Guitars” and hoped for 1 million views over a year but instead received 4.3 million views in a matter of days. The United stocks plummeted and the corporation lost $180 million dollars. How?
Today’s media network is very interconnected, complex, and unpredictable. But there are some key pointers to why Carroll’s videos went viral. According to the case study we received in class (must be purchased so I cannot put a link), Carroll released the video on YouTube and had some friends tweet it to people who also had bad experiences with United. They also tweeted it to people like Jay Leno, Jimmy Fallon, and Perez Hilton and social news sites like Digg. Soon Consumerist.com saw the video and even the Los Angeles Times wrote about it. That was its first mainstream appearance. The next day, more mainstream media sources like CNN and CBS Morning Show began to talk about the video making the “United Breaks Guitars” story heard all around the country.
Tweeting to people that can relate and to large personalities like Jay Leno definitely had the video begin in a good place. People with bad experiences with United will probably share the video with others and people like Jay Leno, who probably has a gigantic media network, have the power to spread news. YouTube is also readily accessible making it easy for people to watch. The video was shared to a handful of people, then it spread to others in their social/media network, which then made the easily accessible video spread to many other networks in a matter of minutes! Once the video was mentioned on the LA Times, it was probably in tons of different places, continuing to spread like wildfire because of the inter-connectivity of the media that we know today. If a small source such as the “United Breaks Guitars” video reaches a colossal media source such as CNN, it means there were a lot of different “nodes” sharing it with CNN at the same time. This video definitely would not have gone viral ten years ago, when the media connections were not as strong, diverse, and interconnected. Because of the revolutionized media network, anything can go viral at anytime with just the right footing.
Sources:
http://www.fastcompany.com/1320152/broken-guitar-has-united-playing-blues-tune-180-million
“United Breaks Guitars” by John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld (Harvard Business School) – in class source
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo