On 9 September 2014, the band U2 gave away their new album ‘Songs Of Innocence’ free to 500 million iTunes subscribers. No doubt sponsored by Apple, the gesture rapidly backfired on the band and, within a month, singer Bono was forced to organise a press conference to apologise for the incident. Listening to him speak, it was still pretty evident that he didn’t know what the band had done wrong. It was an apology of sorts, but then again any apology containing the word ‘if’ isn’t really.
In Bono and clearly Apple’s mind, the gesture was a no-brainer success story. What customer wouldn’t want a free album? From one of the most popular bands on the planet no less.
But the gesture disobeyed two and likely three of the First Principle foundations of human behaviour. People make decisions for good reasons and real reasons. The ‘real’ reasons are the ones that come from our emotional brain. That part of our thinking focuses around four Principles: we want Autonomy, we want Belonging, we want to feel like we’re Competent and we want to do things that have Meaning. ABC-M.
The innovation rule is that all four – ABC-M – all need to be moved in an improving direction.
If U2 had been aware of this rule, they would quickly have seen that:
a) By installing the album onto customer’s iPhones without permission, they demonstrated that they, the band, were in Control and the customer was not.
b) U2 is a very polarising band. Lots of people love them. Even more feel the opposite. If you love U2 and they give you their new album, your sense of allegiance and Belonging to the U2-tribe is likely to go up. If, on the other hand, you really don’t like U2 and they force their new album on your phone, it comes across like they’ve tried to force you to Belong to a tribe you’ve already decided you want no part of. Forcing tribal solutions on non-tribe members will only ever have one effect: it will unite the non-tribe members against you even more.
c) Then, if getting the A and B wrong, as if to twist the knife they’d stuck in everyone’s stomach, when the majority of the 500 million tried to delete the album from their accounts they quickly noticed it wasn’t easy. Now hundreds of millions of customers also felt incompetent.
Three years later, the band are still taking stick for their Song of Naivety. Or was it Songs of Meglamania?
ABC-M all need to get better. It’s not rocket science.