Consumer Behavior

United Breaks Guitar Case Analysis

Group 3

Garvit Gupta B021

Ujan Bhattacharjee B007

Shalin Saxena B051

Akshay Sharma B055

Siddharth Jain B023

Saurabh Oberoi B042

Que 1: Combine your insights from the case, your presentations done last week and the following 2
articles to build a sense of what it takes for an idea to propagate through social media

The following are crucial in making an idea propagate through social media

 Viral Coefficient (k) – This essentially defines the reach/extent of virality based on
o Number of invites sent to each new customer
o % of invites that convert into customers
 K = i*conv%
And the Viral coefficient should be greater than 1 to achieve true virality
 Viral Cycle Time: The Viral Cycle Time is the time that it takes for this cycle to complete.
This variable is inversely proportional to virality. The shorter the cycle time, the more are the
possible number of cycles and hence greater is the virality on social media.
 Platform: The platform to share the content should be easily accessible. For example if you can
share the video through fb, Instagram or any other popular social medium, the user would be
more interested in sharing the video as it would not take him any kind of extra effort in doing
that
 Idea: The Product should be good enough that people want to share it with their friends and is
unique in nature. When an idea hits the nerve of the masses, or connects to them in a way that
no other idea does, they resonate with it and are motivated to pass on the message. Usually the
idea that goes viral is something that the masses have either faced before or very easily are able
to connect with
 Paid Search or SEO: If an idea is not able to achieve virality it can also be achieved through paid
search such as Adwords or by using SEO optimization to propagate it through social media

Que 2: Evaluate United’s response to David Carroll’s video? Did the airline handle the incident?
They tried to handle the situation by the following ways:

1) They used the twitter handle by tweeting the sentence “ This has hit a chord with us “ by
emphasizing on the fact that they have taken notice and have contacted Dave in an attempt to
pacify the situation
2) Rob Bradford apologized to Carroll for the incident and asked if they can use the video for
training purposes to help change its culture
3) They offered him 1200$ in cash plus 1200$ worth flight vouchers. When Carroll declined they
transferred 3000$ to a musical school
4) They were selective in media questions they answered many question but did not respond to it
on their website or you tube channel to avoid any kind of negative publicity
According to us the airline did try to pacify the incident but it was too late as they had already
drawn a lot of flak because of their laidback attitude. They had a lot of backlash in the form of:
1) Falling stock prices
2) Their rating on American customer satisfaction index came down
3) People questioning why I took them 15 months and a viral video to respond to a customer’s
genuine grievance
 Thus a lot of damage had already been done and their image had taken a hit and now they
were not being seen as a customer oriented airline by many people

Que 3: Why was this video seen by so many people, so quickly?

 Carroll wrote a song which was which also accompanied by a biting video produced by his
friends.
 Throughout the night, 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. This resulted in social motivation and people sharing the video
since they could personally connect with the message.
 It was also shared to the 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.
 These factors helped in making the viral conversion factor high.
 The video was catchy and was just needed to be viewed and shared to reach out to the masses.
It was able to drive the emotions and therefore leading to a short viral cycle time

Que 4: In general, how should corporations prepare for the challenge posed by user-generated video
and other material disseminated on social media?

First of all, corporations should make sure to have an effective customer grievance system which leaves
no or very less scope to have negative user generated content. Bad news seems to travel faster than a
good one as mentioned in the case.

So to avoid any social media disasters, corporations should look to have a good product and an even better
after service. It is essential to highlight the positive reviews and experiences from the customers. If by
any chance, a customer had any bad service experience, corporations should make sure of redressing it
as soon as possible and never leave the touch with the customer/ complainant until the problem is
resolved and customer is happy with the after service. Then it is also essential to highlight that the
grievance of the customer is resolved which shows that every customer is valuable for the company. Also
it is essential to address the problem as early as possible since if problem is left unheard, it may be a
potential threat to the online reputation of the company.