Out of the Box

How Does BP Get Out of the Box?

By Menachem Lubinsky on June 07 2010

There are disasters and then there are disasters. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a monumental disaster that BP (British Petroleum Company) promised to eventually get right in ads it had taken out a few weeks ago. The problem is that by the time that they do get it right, it may very well end in an unprecedented environmental catastrophe. Long after they finally cap the leak, the oil spill will continue to be headlines not only in the affected communities but throughout the world. The president promised an investigation and so did Congress. Americans are assured of months and perhaps years of coverage of the nightmare. Some political pundits are already predicting that the BP fiasco will have major repercussions in the mid-term elections for Congress and perhaps make Barack Obama a one-term president.

I am sure that PR specialists, crisis management experts, and marketing strategists are hard at work trying to spin, just about any spin. The immediate charge is to show some remorse while assuring the public that they are competent to bring this disaster to a successful conclusion. Each attempt at sealing the leak so far has brought only frustration and more bad PR, so much so that some media personalities now say that BP stands for “bad publicity.”

Many marketers are using the BP case as the latest laboratory for crisis PR and marketing management. For example, one marketer says that the company needs to constantly say that it is sorry, even if it puts the company in a position of weakness. Others say that the company should only discuss what it is doing and perhaps what it will be doing to prevent such spills from happening in the future 5000 feet beneath the surface. There is no point in minimizing the damage since the public has a front row seat of the gushing oil spilling into hundreds of miles of ocean.

There are those that say that there is no way out for BP and that no amount of assurance will put Americans at ease about their oil drilling. That may change if BP somehow comes up with a credible plan to make such drilling safe. At this point it certainly appears that no amount of reassurance can in the short term mitigate one of America’s huge disasters. For decades any large-scale PR calamity will reference the BP event as an example of a PR nightmare that perhaps only time can heal.

So what do you do if you are BP? It goes without saying that heads will roll and that there will be much finger-pointing on how the disaster was handled, but the company has little choice but to acknowledge its mistakes and invest into a future strategy that is reassuring and upheld by the scientific community. It may become victim to a new age of regulation on off-shore drilling.

There is something to be said for taking responsibility. In truth, BP did from the beginning treat the fiasco as if it was its problem. It is, say some, a double-edge sword. If it could have swiftly solved the problem that would have been admirable, but when it began to “let’s try this and let’s try that,” it might have been better off if it reached out for US government intervention. Of course, the Obama critics are saying that he should never have waited for BP to solve the problem and that the government should have stepped in forcefully and resolutely. Even if the government had no better answers than BP, the fact that they were making the effort could have helped the Obama administration.

OK, if BP takes the responsibility, then what? Marketers say that the next step would be to be completely transparent. In a sense, they would need to bring the average American into their command center as a means of reassuring the public that the search for a solution is unprecedented. It took quite some time until Americans were even allowed to see photographs of the spill, as damaging as that might be to the company.

Apology. Responsibility. Transparency. All that may seem appropriate and could have been taken from a crisis management manual, but BP will have to do a lot more. Compensation. It will have to deal with the devastating losses by people who live in the Gulf. After all, it is the image of despair that is coming from that part of the country that is setting the tone for how Americans view the oil spill. BP will have to do something very meaningful to ease the pain of those people. This is remorse that comes with a bit of cash. Leaving this to government or to anyone else will not quite cut it.

Interestingly enough, not much focus has been placed on BP being a foreign company. In today’s world of multi-nationals, foreign firms are simply part of the mix. Their expected standards of behavior are no different than Americans.

Once BP will have passed the remorse stage, then and only then, will it be able to move on to the fifth stage which many call rebirth. The company will make an effort to redefine itself with the public, hopefully because all of the other steps were successful. I am not sure where the company will ultimately end up, but I am sure that they just wrote a new chapter in Crisis Marketing Management.

Out of the Box is a collection of strategic marketing articles that Lubicom has published on various topics, trends and ideas in the marketing world. The articles have been published in the Hamodia weekly newspaper circulated on three continents to a readership of well over 100,000.

The name, "Out of the Box" is a term used frequently in business nowadays to describe creative thinking that is not the norm. It is meant to help a business pull away from the pack or separate oneself from the competition. It is to some extent fraught with risk, simply because it is not the run of the mill thinking, but it is at the same time the key to reaching the next opportunity.