Oil-smeared logos to match BP’s tarnished image
Jun 04 2010
Sarah Barmak Special to the Star
Oil giant BP is already besieged by mounting damage lawsuits, a U.S. Justice Department investigation, and a tumbling stock price. Now, some want to hit the company responsible for the Gulf oil spill where it hurts: right in the logo.
A Greenpeace competition inviting satirical redesigns of BP’s trademark is soaring in popularity—659 entries in just a couple of weeks. Contestants have plastered images of oil-soaked seabirds and drills onto the company’s sunny, green “Helios” logo. One entry looks like BP’s real logo at first, until one notices it is made of green dollar bills.
“Some of them are really clever,” says Ben Ayliffe, a senior campaigner at Greenpeace UK, where the “Behind the Logo” rebranding campaign was conceived as a protest against BP’s investment in deepwater drilling and planned entrance into the Alberta tar sands market.
“One of them we were looking at last week (was) a logo whose petals had fallen into pool of oil. At the other end of the spectrum, a kid had drawn a scribbled logo with the tagline: ‘Children could run it better, probably.’ There was one that was a skull underneath the Helios logo that looks like cross between HP Lovecraft and Megadeth.”
It has caused a nightmare for BP’s already-tattered brand. One can already purchase oil-splattered “BP cares” t-shirts, sold to raise money for the Gulf Restoration Network (no relation to Greenpeace). In New York, BP billboards have been defaced with mud.
And a prank Twitter account—the official-sounding @BPGlobalPR—that sends out messages mocking BP has more than 120,000 followers, many times that of BP’s real Twitter feed. (Sample tweet: “ANNOUNCEMENT: No one is allowed to look at our oil. All Gulf residents are required to close their eyes until this is over.”)
Parodies of a company’s advertising are not new—they have been recurring gags in Mad, on Saturday Night Live and the Canadian magazine Adbusters. The eco-friendly BP trademark seems to be an irresistible target for defacement, however. The logo vandalism has underscored the glaring dissonance between the company’s green branding and its failure to cap what may become the worst oil spill in U.S. history—as much as 19,000 barrels a day, by some estimates.
“BP in the past few years has spent a lot of money repositioning and rebranding themselves as ‘Beyond Petroleum,’“ says Ayliffe. “They were supposed to be this acceptable, wonderful, green, wholesome company, and their logo reflected that. The Gulf disaster is at odds with this.”
In 2000, BP launched an environmentally friendly marketing campaign with a new slogan, “Beyond Petroleum,” to tout its efficiency and investments in alternative fuels. It introduced a radiant, optimistic-looking, green-and-yellow logo, which it dubbed “Helios”—”after the Greek sun god,” according to publicity materials.
To many environmental advocates, BP’s “Beyond Petroleum” campaign was a classic example of “greenwashing”—the corporate practice of claiming exaggerated or false green credentials in order to reassure shareholders and clients. Despite having invested billions in alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power over the past decade, such sources have only made up a fraction of BP’s business. Of its $20 billion total investment for 2010, it expects to invest about five per cent in alternative energy, according to BP spokesperson Robert Wine.
“No renewables are commercially viable yet (with exception of some solar, in some countries) without subsidies of one form or another,” explained Wine.
Yet despite criticism, “Beyond Petroleum” and Helios were a resounding success with consumers before the spill.
What was previously a “middle of the pack” oil and gas company moved to the top of its category in terms of its brand loyalty, according to Robert K. Passikoff, president of U.S. market research firm Brand Keys.
“When they evolved the strategy ‘Beyond Petroleum’ and redid their logo in sunny yellow, it was something people were engaged in,” he says. “They owned that positioning in a strategic area that has become more important.”
A Brand Keys consumer loyalty study done shortly after the Deepwater Horizon spill, however, showed BP had sunk to dead last.
“They’re not so green anymore,” says Passikoff.
Ironically, BP probably has more to worry about than Exxon did after their 1989 spill precisely because of BP’s green branding, he says.
“I’m surmising here, but (it seems) the situation was different for (Exxon) because they weren’t setting themselves up as the environmentally friendly leaders of the world,” says Passikoff. “BP has a longer way to fall.” A panel of judges will choose a winning entry of the Greenpeace contest after it closes at the end of June.
“We’re going to use the logo as the face of our campaign to get BP out of the tar sands,” Ayliffe says.
Until then, submissions continue to pour in—many replacing BP’s green with glowing red or muddy brown colours, or showing logos spattered with oily black slicks.
A recent @BPGlobalPR tweet mocked BP’s difficult road ahead rebuilding their image:
“As part of our continued re-branding effort, we are now referring to the spill as ‘Shell Oil’s Gulf Coast Disaster’.”
Passikoff is unsure of whether their green brand can ever come back.
“Can you see them coming back and saying we’re still the greenest of the green?” he says. “As long as it was just advertising, that was easy. Now they’re under a microscope.”
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