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BP's Hayward Is Part Of A Much Larger, And Expensive, Problem

John Heilemann starts his "The Power Grid" column by eviscerating Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) for proclaiming that BP CEO Tony Hayward would be sliced and diced when he appeared before the House subcommittee he chairs. Then he weighs in on the "preening and witless blustering" of his colleagues at the hearing the next day, only to be outdone by the "unfathomable stupidity" of Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) for apologizing to Hayward (and then retracting it.")

Hayward himself, who has been roasted to burnt crisp elsewhere (Brandchannel's Shirley Brady leads her roundup of the news this morning with "criticism of BP has shifted in full force to CEO Tony Hayward," for example), actually isn't worth much of Heilemann's time. He spends most of the column lambasting BP itself for what his buddy, corporate-branding guru Neil Parker calls "probably the ballsiest rebrand in corporate-identity history."

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It seems that BP's very splashy efforts at portraying itself as green while "de-positioning" its competition as "petro-dinosaurs" was little more than a marketing shell game. On safety issues alone, BP had 760 violations over the past five years; Exxon Mobil had one. But we American consumers take a hit on the hypocrisy front, too.

BP's marketing "played to the contradictory impulses felt by consumers when it came to energy and the environment," Heilemann writes. Sure, we're concerned about the future of the planet, but we're also inclined "to duck the hard choices entailed by doing anything about it."

General Sentiment CEO Greg Artzt, meanwhile, tells Marketing Daily's Karl Greenberg that BP has lost close to a billion dollars in online brand value since the late-April Deepwater Horizon explosion.

Read the whole story at New York, Brandchannel, Marketing Daily »

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