Brandjack News

By Quentin Langley <P>

When the American oil giant, Standard Oil, was broken up, one part of it, mostly based in the Mid West, became known as the American Oil Company, usually shortened to Amoco.  Decades later it was one of the ‘seven sisters’ the big private sector oil companies that dominated the refining and marketing of oil and petroleum products.  Along with Shell and BP from Europe and Exxon (Esso), Mobil, Texaco and Chevron from the US, Amoco was among the most well-known companies in the world.  The very biggest oil companies, of course, are much more anonymous.  The big exploration and production companies, like Saudi Aramco, the Kuwait National Oil Corporation and Nigerian National Petroleum Company remain government owned and avoid developing a consumer profile.

In the 1990s, the oil industry began to concentrate again.  Exxon merged with Mobil, Texaco with Chevron and BP with Amoco.  Only the very largest, already an Anglo-Dutch joint venture, avoided this and remained as Royal Dutch Shell.  When BP merged with Amoco and absorbed the much smaller ARCO, the original plan was to brand all the American gas stations as Amoco with the BP name being used elsewhere.  However, the BP name soon came to dominate.  The name British Petroleum was dropped and the company name was officially changed to BP.  The company began to use the slogan ‘beyond petroleum’.

 The slogan – combined with the green floral logo (even though green has long been the corporate colour) – has given an impression that BP is the greenest of the oil companies.  This is an open invitation to environmental groups to examine corporate practices and determine whether or not the claim is justified.  In their own minds, I think, BP executives were sincere about ‘beyond petroleum’.  But they didn’t mean now.  Nor, necessarily, in your lifetime.  The oil companies expect a significant proportion of cars to be hydrogen powered within the next forty years.  Perhaps petrol driven cars will have almost disappeared, except from the collections of classic car enthusiasts within another twenty to thirty years.  But did no-one stop to ask the obvious question: when they use the slogan ‘beyond petroleum’, are the public not likely to assume they have a faster timescale in mind.

BP tried to stand up the ‘beyond petroleum’ claim by becoming the world’s leader in solar power.  It came with a relatively small price tag: they spent $45 million acquiring Solarex.  This was around the same time they were buying ARCO (another oil company) for $26.5 billion.

BP should have predicted that the attempt at greenwash would draw the unwelcome attention of NGOs, who would conclude the company was doing nowhere near as much as it should in the renewable field and that the slogan was deceptive.  Greenpeace decided last year to focus a major campaign on BP designed to influence its decision on exploiting tar sand oil reserves in Canada.

It was purely bad luck, of course, that, before the Greenpeace campaign reached its height, the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up.  A Greenpeace campaign designed with one purpose became somewhat recalibrated and pushed to the front of everyone’s attention.  

Loudly proclaiming green credentials which simply do not stand public scrutiny was a strategic error of the first order.  For this to be followed by an environmental calamity has put enormous, possibly irreparable stress on the BP brand.  Every company valuation includes ‘goodwill’ – the value of the brand, over and above the value of the company’s assets.  BP’s market valuation has collapsed, even though almost all its physical assets (Deepwater Horizon aside) are worth exactly as much as they were a few weeks ago.

Perhaps, when the dust settles and the oil in the Gulf has dispersed, this Anglo-American giant – 40% of its shares are traded in New York – will rebrand as Amoco.

by Quentin Langley

Every business occasionally experiences a customer complaint. How the business handles that situation says a lot about it. In the era of social media and brandjacking, the matter becomes ever more sensitive.

The problem is, you don’t know who that customer that you just alienated actually is. The image of some pompous customer demanding “do you know who I am?” may seem humorous but, you never know, it might be Time’s Person of the Year for 2006 – the internet content creator.

That was certainly Dell’s experience when it made an enemy of blogger and journalist, Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis began telling the story of his troubles with his ‘lemon’ of a Dell laptop and, worse, his treatment by their customer service teams. He began telling this story on his blog, and was stunned by the scale of the reaction. It seems that such problems at Dell were not as rare as the company would have liked or tried to imply.

Jarvis began to collate stories of poor customer service by Dell under the heading “Dell Hell”. Suddenly, disgruntled customers who had been separate and isolated were organised and communicating. The blog began to attract international attention. Dell was not in control of, or even really participating in the conversation about its brand. Dell had been brandjacked.

Eventually, Dell reacted the right way. They brought Jarvis inside. He became a part of first critiquing and then restructuring their entire customer complaints procedure. He helped train their staff. Now he is an ambassador for the company.

Another company that, eventually, got it right is United Airlines. This all stems from the unfortunate experience of airline customer and songwriter, Dave Carroll. I won’t tell you his story, but let him do it himself.

A year after the launch of the video, if you type “unit” into the search box on YouTube “United breaks guitars” is the third default option.

The YouTube video attracted 150,000 viewers on day one, and United Airlines contacted Carroll offering to solve the problem they had been steadfastly refusing to address for a year. But viral videos don’t stop there. The video had half a million hits in three days and five million in little over a month. At the time of writing, eleven months after the video was posted, it has almost nine million views. United got brandjacked. The Times suggested that in the four days after Carroll posted the video United’s stock price fell by 10%, wiping $180 million off the value of the company. This cannot be definitively attributed to Carroll’s brandjacking of the company – the price of the whole sector had been volatile for some time – but I have no doubt it concentrated some minds.

By the time United settled with Carroll, Taylor Guitars had already replaced the damaged instruments so United made a $3,000 donation to charity and gave Carroll some flight vouchers. It has certainly been reported that, contrary to his statement in the song, he does still fly with United, on his many trips to speak at conferences and training seminars about customer service. On one such flight, United lost his luggage.

by Quentin Langley

It was one of the most powerful scenes in movie history – and memorably parodied in Life of Brian. To avoid the terrible punishment of crucifixion, all the rebel slaves had to do was identify their leader, Spartacus. But just as Kirk Douglas stands to identify himself as Spartacus, so do two others, closely followed by more, until every member of captured rebel army is yelling “I am Spartacus”.

Your reputation is part of a conversation now – but a conversation that is not limited to a few drunks gathered around a bar. This conversation is worldwide. You do have legal recourse. If someone infringes your intellectual property or defames your reputation, you can take legal action. If you can find Spartacus. And if the attempt to find him doesn’t blow the story to a hundred times its previous size.

Just like Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus, Greenpeace doesn’t hide its role in leading these conversations. But, as Nestlé found, getting Greenpeace to take down its illegal material doesn’t always help. The parody of the Kit Kat advert, in which the office worker bites into an orangutan’s finger, infringed Nestlé’s copyright, and YouTube dutifully removed it. But other versions were rapidly posted, and the story moved on to debating Nestlé’s heavy-handed tactics. The story was bigger than ever. This was a crowd now, and you can’t sue a crowd. But if you anger it, you can turn it into a mob.

The old rules have changed. Tactics which worked only two or three years ago don’t work any more.

Just as you can’t sue a crowd, you can’t ban a conversation. All you can do is join in. If you are part of the old mindset, if the slogan “no-one ever got fired for buying IBM” would have worked on you, then maybe you are not nimble enough for the new rules. Because there is no doubt that joining in the conversation has risks. But standing aloof or, worse, trying to shut it down, is going to be worse.

This is brandjacking. When there is a conversation taking place about your brand, and you are not part of it, you have lost ownership of your reputation. But this only formalises a reality which has always existed. Your reputation is not simply what you say it is. Your reputation has only ever existed in other people’s minds. This is the territory on which the battles for your reputation are going to be fought – and it is asymmetrical warfare.

Terence Fane-Saunders of Chelgate has always argued that the key rule in crisis management is to be the source of your own story. If you are in the news, you need to be telling the story, not leaving it to others. It remains good advice, but in the realm of web 2.0, it conflicts with another of the old rules in public relations: keep a tight control over who can speak for your organisation. The only practical way to engage with social media is to encourage the whole organisation to tweet and Facebook. The message will be confused, but it will be much more credible.

In the old days, your reputational army engaged with other armies – your competitors, say, or unions. Those armies are still out there, and Greenpeace is the largest of them all. It turns over Eu200 million a year, almost all of it spent on its core business, which is campaigning. There are not many businesses which can spend even a tenth of that on PR. The majority of businesses cannot even match one percent of Greenpeace’s campaigning budget.

But social media – for all the engagement of goliaths such as Greenpeace – is the territory of guerilla warfare. You can’t defeat or even engage with your critics if they simply melt into the rest of the population.

Greenpeace did not anticipate that its palm oil campaign would lead to Nestlé folding quite so quickly. Nestlé has been resisting the campaigns of its critics – on baby formula, for example – for decades. And yet this campaign was over in weeks.

There are differences, of course. Palm oil is only one, fairly minor, ingredient in a Kit Kat. But if even Nestlé will fold in weeks, and even Greenpeace does not fully understand the power that it is wielding , then the battle for the control of reputation has changed fundamentally during the course of 2010.

Of course, Marcus Crassus had the whole of Spartacus’s army crucified. That option was never really open to Nestlé.

by Quentin Langley

Every business occasionally experiences a customer complaint. How the business handles that situation says a lot about it. In the era of social media and brandjacking, the matter becomes ever more sensitive.

The problem is, you don’t know who that customer that you just alienated actually is. The image of some pompous customer demanding “do you know who I am?” may seem humorous but, you never know, it might be Time’s Person of the Year for 2006 – the internet content creator.

That was certainly Dell’s experience when it made an enemy of blogger and journalist, Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis began telling the story of his troubles with his ‘lemon’ of a Dell laptop and, worse, his treatment by their customer service teams. He began telling this story on his blog, and was stunned by the scale of the reaction. It seems that such problems at Dell were not as rare as the company would have liked or tried to imply.

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