BP's [re]Branding Challenge
Is the BP name tarnished for good, or can the company revive its brand after one of the worst oil spills in history?
It's been a hundred days since the Deepwater Horizon exploded. Today the oil cap is in place, Tony Hayward has been exiled to Russia, and we're rolling up our sleeves for a cleanup of mind-numbing magnitude.
While it appears BP has stemmed the flow and the spill won't get any worse, there are still many unknowns. One of those is the fate of BP's now infamous 'Beyond Petroleum' brand. Any brand would take a drubbing in a catastrophe like this. But BP has been hammered exponentially harder because of the company's greener-than-thou repositioning in 2000.
Even then, there were skeptics who accused BP of greenwashing. But the majority of us believed. In 2003, BP ranked 69th among BusinessWeek's most valuable global brands. In 2010 it was named one of the most relevant identities of the decade by the blog Brand New.
As Derrick Daye and Brad VanAuken write in Branding Insider, "People bought into BP's repositioning because they saw glimmers of actual behavioral change. But if we had all looked harder, we would have realized that glimmers were all they were."
So can BP's brand survive this spectacular fall? Or is our sense of betrayal so great that we can never forgive?
Not having a crystal ball handy, I relied on my own experience building and saving brands, and came up with a few options that Bob Dudley, the new head of BP, might be contemplating. They are:
1. Sell BP, making all this brand conjecture someone else's problem
2. Hide BP behind its subsidiaries
3. Become British once more
4. Make BP really stand for Beyond Petroleum
Sell BP
Dougie Youngson, a London-based analyst at Arbuthnot Securities, said "Things are going to be a lot tougher for BP in the States in the future. It could well be their position in America just becomes untenable and they could ultimately have to sell those assets as a package to one of their peers."
The obvious suitor is Royal Dutch Shell. Ex-BP CEO John Browne said in his autobiography that the companies quietly explored such a move in 2004.
Steve Goldstein of MarketWatch acknowledges that Shell has problems of its own, but at least they've been more in the accounting realm (such as when it infamously overstated the value of its oil reserves at the beginning of the last decade). As such, converting BP USA into Shell would have a calming effect on the brand...or at least it would remove the spectre of spills and explosions.
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