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 »