Posted by Menachem Lubinsky on July 1, 2010 under Brands, Out of the Box | 
I read with interest several articles and comments by marketing executives who were assigned the task of branding British Petroleum (BP). There seems to be a sense of betrayal and disillusionment that a brand that they thought could never fail actually let them down. It seems that many marketing executives look at branding as more than a professional exercise. It isn’t just that they built a brand that was highly successful economically. It is an affirmation of perfection and even of doing good for the broader society. BP no doubt touted its multi-faceted programs at helping communities, the environment, cleaner energy, and helping the disadvantaged, all of which made the marketing professionals look good as well.
The stakes for the marketer in a branding effort are extremely high, particularly if the brand becomes a national and international icon. Those who worked on Exxon prior to its disaster and more recently on BP are asking themselves how they could possibly protect themselves from a brand that falls from the highest summit.
If you think that this discussion is well out of reach of common everyday business practices, think again. As marketers, we are always subject to the assurances of the client despite our own due diligence that their product or service is brand-worthy. In fact, many agencies today demand proof about a claim of a product’s quality. The fact that they will be paid well may not be enough to persuade the agencies to take on the account. They may be concerned about the long-term viability of the brand, but they will also want to be assured that the brand will live up to its name.
The power of branding is such that it is much more than a name, symbol, or logo. Customers actually become emotionally attached to the extent that they really do wear it on their sleeves. Wearing a brand is to many consumers not an ancillary item. It becomes very much a part of their persona. They really do take “you are what you wear” to a different level. But oddly this emotional attachment is not reserved for customers only. Officials at marketing agencies become equally as attached. Working on a brand account is somehow not only a sign of success, but it also becomes part of their persona.
So whether it was Exxon, BP, Toyota or Tylenol, the professionals working on branding pondered the key question of “how could it have happened?” Mistakes and accidents are simply not supposed to be a part of the branding effort, which is what makes them the brand. But as we have all learned in the recent past, brands are not invincible and when they fall it is from a much higher plain.
But brands are said to have yet another advantage which is why they are so coveted. They most often have the ability to recover when other products and services faced with the same calamity simply fold. BP presumably designated $20 billion for amongst other things compensation and damages to people living in the Gulf area. It obvious takes a BP to commit that kind of money to survive, but not only to survive, to resurface with the brand intact.
Over the past half century, several airlines have either had to fold, merge, or change their names after an accident. Safety is so paramount in the psyche of consumers that recovery is difficult unless the public is lead to believe that the brand is no longer a factor, one way or another. Or, as Tylenol did when its product was tampered with, create a tamper-proof bottle to essentially promise consumers that the calamity cannot repeat itself.
It will take a lot more than the $20 billion for BP to prove that they have taken the necessary steps to assure the public that an off-shore drilling accident like what happened in the Gulf of Mexico will never happen again. Toyota is still busy trying to convince its customer base that its automobiles are safe. They are on an intense campaign to convince the public that gas pedals will not accelerate on their own and that brakes will stop when prompted.
Marketers agree that the public expects nothing short of perfection when it comes to brands. The professionals too want to feel that they are working on a product that exudes success. It is perhaps the dream of many entrepreneurs to develop a product that turns out to be a brand. Needless to say, the rewards can be enormous.
In the late ‘90’s a young man with an electronic testing gadget for physicians (and for home use) was convinced that he had the ultimate new product. He had an exclusive with the producers in Asia and had managed to raise a considerable amount of capital to market the product. As a first step, I suggested distributing the product (retailing at $249) to at least 10 physicians to make sure that the product lived up to its hype. The entrepreneur thought that it was a waste of time since it already had been tested and marketed in Belgium. He wanted this gadget to become a national brand or the “next Apple,” as he termed it. Seven out of the 10 physicians reported problems with the device including not working properly in sunlight. Needless to say, his dream fizzled. Like the marketers involved with BP, I was glad that I did not become emotionally involved with a product and potentially a brand that was less than perfect.
Posted by Menachem Lubinsky on June 7, 2010 under Out of the Box |
There are disasters and then there are disasters. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a monumental disaster that BP (British Petroleum Company) promised to eventually get right in ads it had taken out a few weeks ago. The problem is that by the time that they do get it right, it may very well end in an unprecedented environmental catastrophe. Long after they finally cap the leak, the oil spill will continue to be headlines not only in the affected communities but throughout the world. The president promised an investigation and so did Congress. Americans are assured of months and perhaps years of coverage of the nightmare. Some political pundits are already predicting that the BP fiasco will have major repercussions in the mid-term elections for Congress and perhaps make Barack Obama a one-term president.
I am sure that PR specialists, crisis management experts, and marketing strategists are hard at work trying to spin, just about any spin. The immediate charge is to show some remorse while assuring the public that they are competent to bring this disaster to a successful conclusion. Each attempt at sealing the leak so far has brought only frustration and more bad PR, so much so that some media personalities now say that BP stands for “bad publicity.”
Many marketers are using the BP case as the latest laboratory for crisis PR and marketing management. For example, one marketer says that the company needs to constantly say that it is sorry, even if it puts the company in a position of weakness. Others say that the company should only discuss what it is doing and perhaps what it will be doing to prevent such spills from happening in the future 5000 feet beneath the surface. There is no point in minimizing the damage since the public has a front row seat of the gushing oil spilling into hundreds of miles of ocean.
There are those that say that there is no way out for BP and that no amount of assurance will put Americans at ease about their oil drilling. That may change if BP somehow comes up with a credible plan to make such drilling safe. At this point it certainly appears that no amount of reassurance can in the short term mitigate one of America’s huge disasters. For decades any large-scale PR calamity will reference the BP event as an example of a PR nightmare that perhaps only time can heal.
So what do you do if you are BP? It goes without saying that heads will roll and that there will be much finger-pointing on how the disaster was handled, but the company has little choice but to acknowledge its mistakes and invest into a future strategy that is reassuring and upheld by the scientific community. It may become victim to a new age of regulation on off-shore drilling.
There is something to be said for taking responsibility. In truth, BP did from the beginning treat the fiasco as if it was its problem. It is, say some, a double-edge sword. If it could have swiftly solved the problem that would have been admirable, but when it began to “let’s try this and let’s try that,” it might have been better off if it reached out for US government intervention. Of course, the Obama critics are saying that he should never have waited for BP to solve the problem and that the government should have stepped in forcefully and resolutely. Even if the government had no better answers than BP, the fact that they were making the effort could have helped the Obama administration.
OK, if BP takes the responsibility, then what? Marketers say that the next step would be to be completely transparent. In a sense, they would need to bring the average American into their command center as a means of reassuring the public that the search for a solution is unprecedented. It took quite some time until Americans were even allowed to see photographs of the spill, as damaging as that might be to the company.
Apology. Responsibility. Transparency. All that may seem appropriate and could have been taken from a crisis management manual, but BP will have to do a lot more. Compensation. It will have to deal with the devastating losses by people who live in the Gulf. After all, it is the image of despair that is coming from that part of the country that is setting the tone for how Americans view the oil spill. BP will have to do something very meaningful to ease the pain of those people. This is remorse that comes with a bit of cash. Leaving this to government or to anyone else will not quite cut it.
Interestingly enough, not much focus has been placed on BP being a foreign company. In today’s world of multi-nationals, foreign firms are simply part of the mix. Their expected standards of behavior are no different than Americans.
Once BP will have passed the remorse stage, then and only then, will it be able to move on to the fifth stage which many call rebirth. The company will make an effort to redefine itself with the public, hopefully because all of the other steps were successful. I am not sure where the company will ultimately end up, but I am sure that they just wrote a new chapter in Crisis Marketing Management.
Menachem Lubinsky is President and CEO of LUBICOM Marketing Consulting a firm that specializes in strategic business and not-for-profit planning and implementation. LUBICOM is also well known for its role in developing such major events as Kosherfest, Jewish Expo and Jewish Marketplace.
