Advertising and oil industry experts say rebuilding the company's badly tarnished brand could prove to be nearly as daunting of a task, said the report.
"It's probably the most notorious branding crisis in memory," Tom Zara, director of corporate branding at Interbrand, [image-nocss] told the newspaper.
After the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in April, BP went on the air with TV ads and bought a series of full-page newspaper ads to position itself as an imperfect but responsible corporation committed to the cleanup. The company has spent $55.8 million on TV and print advertising so far this year, according to the report, citing Nielsen Co. (The total for all of last year was $80 million, it added.)
But as one of Washington's top corporate lobbying forces, BP took flak for paying lobbyists, so the company cut back that spending to only $3.3 million so far this year, compared with $8.2 million in the first six months of 2009.
BP has been bouncing back already in the place where its brand meets consumersat gas stations. After the spill, sales dropped off 40% to 50% at some stations on the Gulf Coast, but in most cases, business declines have leveled off to about 10% on the Gulf and less than 5% in other parts of the country, John Kleine, executive director of the BP Amoco Marketers Association, told the Post.
Kleine, who calls the station owners "investors" in BP's brand (their only link with the company is contracts to buy gasoline), said they began facing angry protests after the spill and turned to BP for help. The company gave them signs and took out print and radio advertisements emphasizing that the stations were locally owned and operated. At some stations, BP helped the owners do customer appreciation campaigns with free car washes and coffee. Corporate staffers flew in to stand in driveways and listen to customers' concerns, Kleine said.
"Where the owner is known in the community, there is a less significant impact," he added. "I think BP has to recognize that the local face is really a value to their brand even more so than anybody thought."
BP is reviewing its brand positioning and carrying out research to understand how the brand performed in various markets, according to company documents cited by the paper.
The brand is all over the company's Houston-area offices, which are home to the largest concentration of BP employees in the world. The place is decorated with the BP logo's bright shades of green and yellowcolors the company has used in advertisements to play up its interest in the environment and the future.
In the past few months, those colors have been splattered with mud and black paint in protests and an anonymous critic adopted the Twitter handle BPGlobalPR to sarcastically deride the company. The tweeter has more than 190,000 followers. Similarly, about 50 protesters from the activist group Code Pink, some dressed as sea creatures and others wearing only signs and black paint symbolic of the spilled oil, descended on the Houston offices in late May to criticize the company, attract headlines and malign the BP logo.
No one is arguing that BP doesn't deserve the public relations bruising, David Kotok, who monitors the oil industry as chief investment officer for Cumberland Advisors, told the paper. Cumberland estimates that BP will pay out $50 billion to $80 billion in fines, legal damages and settlements related to the oil spill, but even after those checks are written there is still a big unknown in terms of a brand comeback.
"There is a human and psychological factor that is impossible to measure," Kotok said. " 'BP' becomes the identification of the perpetrator of the trauma and it's a long-term relationship damaged."
Public opinion about BP has become only slightly less negative since the start of the spill. In July, the number of people who thought BP should be brought up on criminal charges dropped to 56% from 64% a month earlier, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll. The vast majority thought the company had not handled the spill well.
BP spokesperson Robert Wine told the Post that the company's main focus is to remain around the Gulf Coast until "the job is done...long after the last of the oil has turned up...over the coming months and longer. Rebuilding the brand isn't a marketing exercise. It's about rebuilding the Gulf over the long term."
Separately, an AP-GfK poll conducted August 11-16 found that BP's image is recovering since the company capped the well, though the company's approval level is still "anything but robust." Approval for BP's handling of the oil spill has more than doubledfrom 15% to 33%. Some 66% of those surveyed continue to disapprove of BP's performance, down from 83% in June.
Meanwhile, in Durango, Colo., the local BP office has removed the company logo from its vehicle fleet after harassment complaints from employees, reported The Durango Herald. Curtis Thomas, local spokesperson for BP said management made the call to remove BP's green and yellow "helios" logo from about 200 vehicles after employees reported routine abuse from the public, at traffic lights, gas stations and the grocery store. In July, vandalism was suspected when a BP logo was cut out of an awning at the Durango Arts Center.
(Click here for previous CSP Daily News coverage of the BP oil spill and its repercussions.)
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