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The Authenticity Imperative: Brand Know Thyself

This week on Street Talking in NEXT, I use the contradiction between BP's 'beyond petroleum' campaign and its Gulf of Mexico rig explosion to illustrate how companies create problems for themselves when there is an inconsistency between what their brands proclaim and what their operations reveal.

‘Climate change is an issue which raises fundamental questions about the relationship between companies and society as a whole, and between one generation and the next.’ Can you guess who said that? A campaigner for Friends of the Earth? Wrong. That was Lord John Brown speaking in 2002.

At the time, he was the group chief executive officer of BP, the world’s third largest energy company. Under his watch, BP was the first oil major to admit a direct link between global warming and greenhouse gases, which is still a taboo subject among the Seven Sisters. Two years earlier, the company had rolled out the most audacious campaign ever conceived by an energy company. Developed by Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, the global advertising and PR agency, the $200 million paradigm bending campaign would either change the mindset or set it up for a fall.

With two words, ‘beyond petroleum,’ BP effectively told the world, ‘We are a different type of energy company and we care about the environment. Really.’ According to the company, ”Beyond petroleum’ sums up our brand in the most succinct and focused way possible. It’s both what we stand for and a practical description of what we do.’ What the campaign had done was to define BP as a ‘good’ energy company in a very value-loaded type of way. The others were ‘bad’ energy companies. In the public mind, that quality of goodness covered more than BP’s investment in alternative energy sources. It extended to its Safety & Health standards as well as progress with less environmentally costly Exploration & Production techniques. For better, for worse, henceforth, the company would be judged by those standards.

When mishaps like the March 2006 explosion at the company’s Texas City refinery happened and later, the August 2006 oil spill in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska occurred, public anger was directed as much at the jarring dichotomy between what BP claimed to be in its campaigns and what it really was in its operations as much as at the physical damage proper. Last month’s accident on its Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico, which has caused severe destruction of sea life may well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Can BP still claim to be ‘beyond petroleum’? I strongly doubt it.

Whatever BP says about the errors of engineering or placing the blame on its contractors, one thing is clear: BP’s ‘beyond petroleum’ tag has become BP’s ‘big problem’ albatross. This time, it will take more than Ogilvy & Mather to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Spin is a poor adhesive for fixing cognitive dissonance cracks. John Kenney, an ex-Ogilvy executive who played a key role in developing the campaign, has openly questioned BP’s commitment to the ethos of ‘beyond petroleum.’ He has called on the company to leave the hype and hypocrisy aside and go ‘beyond propaganda.’ Ouch!

I have used BP’s ‘beyond petroleum’ as a type for companies that choose to build their brands around sympathetic signals. It can have a massive upside but it can also be a two edged-sword. Companies need to do an honest assessment about whether they can deliver on these promises before trumpeting them. The corporate communications department at BP and its armies of reputation consultants have got to understand that the company has fallen short of the standards it set for itself. The challenge for BP is not about rebuilding confidence in its brand. There are guidebooks for that. The crisis on the company’s hands is about admitting that BP as BP will never be beyond petroleum. Energy companies will be energy companies in the way boys will be boys. Resigning itself to this humdrum fate will be the hardest part. Greencleaning will not wipe the oily slick away.

Maybe this is why many companies prefer to play it safe with impersonal taglines like ‘Nigeria’s biggest network’ and ‘Africa’s mightiest bank.’ Except for those who find boasting attractive, these ego-thumping chest-drumming claims mean little to most people. But change those to the personalized ‘Helping loved ones stay in touch’ or ‘The listening bank that cares’ and the dynamics change greatly. When the same network goes down on Valentine’s Day or the bank deducts indiscriminate charges, customers will take a very different view than if they had just stuck with the prior descriptions. Google’s ‘Do no Evil’ and JP Morgan’s ‘At all times doing only first-class business, and that in a first-class way,’ are two perfect examples of claims people will scrutinize closely. From him who claims much, much is expected.

So why should companies care at all? Here are two reasons why they should. First, the customer-investor divide has become blurred. The capital markets are paying more attention to companies’ marketing messages and consumers are becoming better attuned to what investors feel. The contagion of distrust in one will contaminate the other. Second, reputation is an increasingly important factor in investment decision-making. Those north-easterly pointing stock price charts are unsustainable if the brand is living a lie. That should be a no-brainer. To thine own brand be true.

The original article may be read here on the NEXT website.

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