BP: Brand Perfidious?

Perfidious – deliberately faithless, treacherous, deceitful. Of, relating to, or marked by perfidy. Synonyms: false, disloyal, unfaithful, traitorous, faithless.

Perfidious is the word that leaped to my mind when I read this opening paragraph in a post on the Fast Company web site:

“There’s no question that BP has lied extensively over the past few months about the growing Gulf oil disaster. The company has bullied journalists, fudged numbers, and even deployed fake journalists to the Gulf to write about how everything is fine. Now BP may be literally trying to cover up oiled beaches by dumping sand on top of them.”

Over the weekend, the Financial Times (FT) and CNN were reporting that BP is bracing for a shake-up at the top, with both the Chairman and the CEO expected to be replaced within weeks.

However, unbelievably, the CNN story reports that the Chairman is being “singled out for criticism by shareholders for his perceived lack of decisive leadership during the crisis and his failure to support Tony Hayward, the embattled chief executive.”

I guess these shareholders have their heads stuck in the same sand that BP apparently is using to cover up the oil-stained beaches in Louisiana.

Mr. Hayward’s performance before the U.S. Congress, in which he tried to handball blame for this disaster to BP’s subcontractors, did nothing to enhance trust in the BP brand or its leadership. Neither did early reports that soon after this disaster BP was offering US$5000 payments to residents affected by the oil spill if they waived their rights to sue for any damages.

The high-powered institutional investors in the UK that own the majority of the BP shares apparently do not have a clue about Corporate Image Management and the impact of the corporate image on share prices.

Both these investors and the BP Board need to understand this finding from the PriceWaterhouseCoopers report Reputation Assurance: The Value of a Good Name:

A single-minded focus that seeks only to satisfy shareholders may ultimately lead to crises and erosion of shareholder value.

Looks like an updated definition of the word perfidious might need to include “can lead to crises and erosion of shareholder value.”

BP’s Brand Hyprocrisy

The Beyond Petroleum positioning of BP may have been little more than hundreds of millions of dollars spent in greenwashing.

According to The Power Grid column in yesterday’s New York magazine, BP’s investment in hydrogen, wind, solar, and biofuels amounts to just 6 percent of its overall capital expenditures.

While this is certainly a significant amount in terms of dollars (or pounds) spent, it pales in comparison to what BP spends annually on oil exploration and production.

And this does not include, writes John Heilemann, “the tens of millions of dollars that BP has spent on lobbying against safety regulations, even as it’s compiled the most abysmal safety record of any major oil company.”

One key point in the article: safety violations by BP over the past five years totaled 760, as compared to only one for Exxon Mobil.

As we wrote yesterday, media monitoring firm General sentiment calculates that BP has lost $1 billion in brand value since the Gulf Oil spill.

It’s not the fact that BP had an accident that makes this brand suspect; it’s the manner in which they have tried to pass off blame and responsibility that bothers most.

Add to the above the 700,000 “friends” who have signed on to one of the three Boycott BP pages on Facebook, and you have a brand that is approaching free fall.

Sadly, the BP Board doesn’t seem to get this yet. By the time they do, it will be too late. (Another reason why Marketing needs to be brought into Corporate Boardrooms.)

The tombstone for the BP brand is being readied, and the graveyard of Enron, WorldCom, HIH Insurance, and myriad others awaits.

BP Drops $1 Billion in Brand Value

Media firm General Sentiment estimates that BP has dropped close to $1 billion in brand value.

That’s roughly four times the impact on the Toyota brand earlier this year, according to the firm.

General Sentiment uses sophisticated software to scour and analyze over 30 million sources of content on the Internet, including from news, social media, blogs, and web sites.

According to an article today in MediaPost’s Marketing Daily, General Sentiment’s CEO Greg Artzt is pessimistic about the impact of this drop in BP’s brand value. “It will cost BP a fortune to dig itself out of the hole it is in just on the media side,” he says, adding “At the retail level, it will affect them. They are clearly worried about their brand. They do a lot of advertising. But look at their market cap, they won’t recover.”

Based on the comments about BP at the brand social networking site Brandkarma, I would have to agree with Artzt. Comments about BP are generally not favorable and the BP brand ranks poor to bad on all five criteria (planet, customers, employees, suppliers, and investors).

Additionally, the three Boycott BP pages on Facebook have accumulated over 700,000 “friends.”

The General Sentiment one-page report on the effect the Gulf Oil spill is having on the BP brand value is available on their web site. However, it wasn’t working this morning when I tried to download it.