Deja Vu?
Into the “Beyond Petroleum” branding void steps Shell Oil.
This multi-national major oil industry player now has an aggressive new ad campaign, in which Shell is claiming to “unlock” a future world powered by new and numerous energy sources and cleaner fossil fuels.
Now where have we heard that one before?
The campaign, which launched just about a month ago, includes television commercials, print ads, online advertising, outdoor executions and two web sites — www.energygalaxy.com and www.shell.us/letsgo.
In the campaign, Shell informs us that the wolrd will soon be on the road to sustainable mobility and that the good guys and gals at Shell are “ready to help tackle the challenges of the new energy future.”
Not one to kick a fellow petroleum dog when it’s down, Shell’s spokesperson told Advertising Age that the campaign had been in the pipeline for almost a year and that the company felt releasing it now was “the right thing to do.”
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.
Tags: Boycott BP, BP, Brand Reputation, Brand Trust, Brand Value, Brandkarma, corporate branding strategies, Corporate Image Management, General Sentiment
Branding, Corporate Image, Marketing | Steven Howard | 
June 22, 2010 11:08 pm | 
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I don’t put much stock in the annual 100 Best Global Brands report from BusinessWeek for two reasons: the valuations by Interbrand never seem to have any relevance and the list is too U.S. centric to truly be called a global brand ranking.
Nevertheless, there is one interesting and pertinent point made in the BusinessWeek article accompanying this annual listing. This concerns the element of trust, or what the article’s two writers refer to as “the most perishable of assets.”
According to the article, recent polling (in the USA) shows that distrust amongst consumers for business as a whole is growing. Citing a phone survey by public relations firm Edelman, only 44% of Americans say they trusted business, a significant decline from the 58% level recorded two years ago.
This point got me to dust off a posting from The Reputation Garage Blog from October 2008 that I had filed.
In that post, a reprint from an article that appeared in HR Leaders magazine, trust is called “one of the defining issues of the emerging century.”
Public trust in big business, governments, and even non-profit organizations has been declining throughout the 21st century. Here are some “fun” statistics that I gleaned from The Reputation Garage Blog:
* As few as 13% of all Americans place their trust in big business (and it’s not much higher for other mature consumer societies!).
* Only 39% of employees in a Watson Wyatt survey said they trusted senior leadership.
* Some three-quarters of US consumers feel that companies don’t tell the truth in advertising.
* Three-quarters of employees in big companies observed violations of the law or company standards in a 12-month period.
As economies start to rebound, marketers and organizational leaders have an important task in front of them: re-establishing their torn and tattered brands and re-building trust with all constituencies.
Failure to do so is not an option. Unless you want the tombstone for your organization’s brand to read “died of trust-related causes.”
Tags: articles on branding, Brand Reputation, Brand Trust, Branding, Business Trust, corporate branding, corporate branding strategies, Corporate Image, global brands, Marketing, Steven Howard
Branding, Corporate Image, Marketing | Steven Howard | November 11, 2009 10:18 pm | Comments (0)
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