This story broke in the L.A. Times a couple of days ago and has been burning up the interwebs ever since.  Dave Carroll of the Canadian country music band Sons of Maxwell sings about a problem he has with United Airlines.  It’s easy to see how productive this game is for Carroll and the Sons of Maxwell, and how damaging it is to United Airlines, a brand that already has a pretty shabby reputation for dealing with passengers.  It is after all, the best customer complaint of the Networked Era.

There are three elements of gamechanging at work in Carroll’s United Breaks Guitars song (with two other ‘complaint songs’ to follow, according to Carroll):

1)  The first is that productive games like this one spin off wealth in unexpected ways.  The game does not pursue wealth, wealth follows the game.  Who knows how much revenue and brand equity Carroll and the Sons of Maxwell are going to generate because of this?  More than the value of the broken guitar, that’s for sure.  Generating wealth was not Carroll’s objective.  The objective was to tell the world his broken guitar story.

2)  The second bit of learning is that emotional and meta meaning trump cosmetic meaning.   It seems as though United Airlines kept its communication with Carroll strictly cosmetic, that is, strictly by the manual and on the surface.  No one accepted responsibility.  No one apologized, or related to the anguish of a traveling country musician without a guitar.  No one stepped outside their corporate role and expressed any kind of personal character.  Instead, the United employees stonewalled, hid, delayed, obfuscated.  They counted on Carroll simply giving up after enough time had passed.  But Carroll never lost his emotional connection to what had happened, and never quit upping the emotional stakes.   In his song, the broken neck of his Taylor guitar serves as a metaphor for all the pissed-off travelers out there.  The emotion and the meta-meaning expressed in Carroll’s song overwhelm the empty rhetoric of the airline.  How can an audience not cheer and share Carroll’s sentiments?

3)  A third gamechanging aspect of Carroll’s song is that it tells the same story in a new genre.   The song is essentially the same story Carroll had been telling for six months. By telling the story again, and doing it in song–with harmony, melody, wit, style and fake moustaches–it took the game to a whole new level.  Stakes were raised, emotions heightened, and the productive game came into existence.  Genre generates games.

Next time you want to communicate anything business-related, first imagine how you’d sing it as a country song, a hard-rock anthem, a hip-hop beat, or whatever your favorite musical genre is.  You’ll discover news ways of expressing your story, and connect with your audience by creating meaning and context that doesn’t exist in the flat data.  When your communication ’sings,’ so does your brand.

Tags: brand, Canada, Communication, Cosmetic, Dave Carroll, Emotion, Emotional, Meta, Sons of Maxwell, United Airlines, United Breaks Guitars

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Branding, Emotion, Games, Narrative, Networked World, Objectives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.