BP’s Latest Brand Disaster: Doctored Pictures

News Corporation is reporting what environmentalists and others have long suspected — that BP has been “playing fast and loose with the truth.”

In a story on Friday on their Australian web site, Newscorp reports that BP has been caught doctoring photos of its response to the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

The story actually originated with the publishing of two altered photos taken from the BP web site by tech web site Gizmodo.

For other examples of BP’s PR approach to this disaster, see our previous post BP: Brand Perfidious.

I suspect that the expected resignation this week of BP CEO Tony Hayward is unlikely to halt the current freefall in the BP corporate brand image.

Let me know if you agree or disagree.

Is Shell Trying to Fill the “Beyond Petroleum” Void?

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.”

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.

Brandkarma — the social network on brands

How do your views of brands stack up with those of others?

Now you can find out — through the Brandkarma web site.

Started by the chief creative officer of one of Australia’s largest ad agencies, Brandkarma is a social media platform “on a mission to help everyone make better brand choices and to influence brand behavior for good.”

The site was founded on two important truths:

1) that in today’s world, brands that span national, social and cultural divides can be a greater force for good than governments, and

2) that we all, as consumers with opinions, have much greater power to influence brand managers and their actions than possibly we currently imagine.

Brandkarma was started to help answer two basic (and important) questions:

1) what kind of world do you want to live in?

2) what kind of a world do you want to leave your kids?

Through this site, all ordinary consumers have a chance to make a difference, assuming Brandkarma grows strong enough to get brand managements to listen.

On the Brandkarma web site, you can comment and score hundreds of brands for any of five criteria: planet, customers, employees, suppliers, or investors.

As Alan Webber, founding editor of Fast Company magazine says in his testimonial on the site, “Let’s all come together around Brandkarma and use it as a platform to help businesses / brands become a force for positive change in the world!”

Enter your own evaluations of brands and join the brand conversations at Brandkarma network today, and let us know what you think. Will this network grow powerful enough to influence the future actions of brands?

Trust Is An Issue For Brands

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.”