June 3 - 6, 2024
Anti-United Airlines Videos Hurting Brand
- August 25, 2009
The first "United Breaks Guitars" video has been viewed more than 5 million times and was recently joined by a second video.
BrandIndex measured buzz ("If you've heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, was it positive or negative?") and reputation ("Would you be proud or embarrassed to work for this brand?"). For buzz, the scores dipped below zero at each video release, which means far more negative perception of the brand than positive. For reputation, perception took big drops as well during both releases.
YouGov's BrandIndex interviews 5,000 people each weekday from a representative U.S. population sample, more
than 1.2 million interviews per year. Respondents are drawn from an online panel of more than 1 million individuals. Margin of error is a very accurate +/- 2%. A score can range from 100 to -100 and
is compiled by subtracting negative feedback from positive. A zero score means equal positive and negative feedback.--Tanya Irwin
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The guitar video reinforced my own long-held negative view of the United Airlines brand. My personal experience with United as a member of their Miles Plus program for over 20 years was that they did not care one bit about me as a person or my business as a consumer. United let me down one time too many and I stopped flying them completely. I had even stopped thinking about how badly they had screwed me... until the broken guitars video. The beauty of that IED is that it also features a time-delayed feature in which deadly negative impressions created years and even decades ago are reactivated anew.
But the truth is, it's not really the videos that are hurting United's consumer reputation, it's United's own humiliating track record and the karma that comes with that kind of epic underachievement.