Looks like the “Friendly Skies of United” are a little less friendly for musicians. Country singer Dave Carroll created a video regarding his less than “friendly” experience flying United Airlines

Carroll had his guitar broken by the airline’s baggage handlers and when he received no compensation with the airline, he took out his frustrations by writing a country song and created a music video about his experience.

The video has since gone viral and was featured on major American and Canadian news outlets. With all this unwanted attention, United Airlines recognized its error and has since contacted Carroll to make reparations. In addition, it has asked to use his video as part of its training.

Here’s the music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

Branding starts at the top and lives at the bottom.

What does that mean?

It means that a CEO or senior management might develop and launch a new “brand promise” initiative (the main thing that the company stands for), but it’s the salespeople and customer service people, the employees on the the front line of the organization, who are the ones that ultimately will deliver on that promise.

One of the keys to ensuring a successful launch of a new brand initiative is to make sure that the people who are on front lines of your customer interaction are involved early on with the process. Their input will ensure that you are not making a promise to your customers that you can’t deliver consistently. And, it being part of the process will give your salespeople and customer service people a sense of ownership with the brand promise and will more likely deliver your company’s promise with “on-brand behavior.”

Many branding and marketing books will try to tell you that there’s some secret formula to making your market feel confident in your company’s ability to deliver, but it’s really rather straight-forward.

To win confidence, you simply have to consistently deliver on what ever promise your company or brand makes. Whatever that promise is, you have to consistently be there.

A lot of companies make a lot of plans around a promise – whether it’s Domino’s promise to deliver your pizza 30 minutes or else it is free or J. Crew’s absolutely no-hassle return policy – if you don’t deliver on that promise, it’s going to cost you.

And even with customer service, as a society we have become more demanding in the quality that we expect and the minimum levels of customer service we’re willing to accept. And, as the world gets smaller with Internet communications, companies need to make pure craftsmanship of customer service.

But, it all starts with being consistent.