Don’t mind your spinning, BP, honesty is the best damage-limitation policy

CONSIDER this as a public relations strategy.

You get a guy with a pleasant voice and a local accent.

You write an advertisement for him that talks about how he and his brother greet everybody who comes into their business with a smile. Not because they’re in the business of profit, but because they love to serve the community where they live. Where their wives live. Where their kids are growing up.

That’s the strategy currently in play in areas of America. Different guys in different locations, all working for BP. Now, clearly, this kind of approach wouldn’t work in Ireland, because Ireland is contrarian by nature. No Irish copywriter in their right mind would produce that line about greeting every customer with a smile, because the response would be: “Big of you. You want praise for not greeting incoming customers with a raised middle finger?”

It’s not going to work in America, either. Particularly not in those states where tourism is on its knees and the seafood industry in an even worse position. People in those states were less than impressed with President Obama’s visit last week. Too damn late, they said, for him to fly in for a day and a dip in the ocean with his younger daughter.

Too damn right, I thought, remembering a former British agriculture minister who, at the height of the CJD horror, staged a photo opportunity with him feeding (it looked as if he was force-feeding) a burger to his little daughter. No evidence exists to suggest the photo of the beef-pusher made wary consumers slap their foreheads and acknowledge their fears were unjustified and they should rush to the nearest butchers to buy the biggest roast available. Although the photographs of the American president were more pleasing – his daughter looked like she was enjoying the swim, whereas John Gummer’s daughter looked like she was on the verge of gagging – they will be equally ineffective.

One of the problems affecting multinationals like BP is the sheer scale of their PR structure. They have corporate PR, brand PR, corporate social responsibility programmes, community PR, whole divisions devoted to lobbying, more divisions constantly measuring how they’re seen by various publics when compared with other corporations in their business. Oh, and let us not forget stakeholder communications, which means a bevy of people who spend their time visiting their peers in industry umbrella groups, supplier bodies and regulators. Not all of these services are provided in-house. Some are sub-contracted at enormous expense to external PR/lobbying/ communications consultancies.

Whether in-house or in the external consultancies, armies of bright young graduates, most clutching an MBA as well as a communications degree, spend months developing multi-faceted strategic communications and reputation management programmes, benchmarking them against international best-in-class and presenting them to managers who lack the courage to call this constantly inflating empire of created tasks what it is: bullshit.

Even if the managers suspect they don’t need half what’s proposed to them, they’re afraid to ditch it, because you never know the day nor the hour that your CEO will be found to be fraudulent or your company the cause of an environmental disaster. (Plus, let’s be honest, the prospect of a personal profile as an “industry and thought leader”, does play to managerial vanity.) Many large corporations invest in grossly disproportionate reputation management strategies and structures as a form of insurance. Except that this quasi insurance failed miserably for countless multinationals this year, starting with BP, going on to Toyota, Goldman Sachs and financial institutions nearer home.

BP, for example, had, for the last 10 years, engaged in an elaborate advertising campaign designed, not to sell petrol to drivers, but to sell the idea of BP as not an oil company at all. The ads reinterpreted the initials as really meaning Beyond Petroleum. Geddit? They were now tree-hugging environmentalists. In fact, you’d be forgiven for believing that they stopped hugging trees only when presented with a solar panel or a wind turbine.

That wasn’t the truth. It was self-regarding corporate self-deception, which may have achieved some traction in the public mind as measured by the metrics employed by the people who dreamed up the campaign, but which proved, when the Gulf oil disaster happened, to have achieved nothing. Media all over the world referred to BP as an oil company. As British Petroleum. Not as Beyond Petroleum.

Even at that point, commonsense PR advice would have helped. But commonsense PR advice doesn’t happen in vast organisations where everybody has a strategy for everything and nobody has a connection with reality. Large organisations are like medieval courts, and their internal PR strategists can’t, when a disaster happens, step out of the subservient courtier role. Instead, as in BP’s case, they started to do PR on the story. Not that much oil was leaking into the sea following the explosion, they said. Only a teeny weeny amount, really. Not much more than a thousand barrels a day. A thousand barrels? Not true. Not even nearly true. Sixty thousand barrels of oil were hitting the water.

Commonsense PR would have told BP: “Tell the truth. Err on the worst end of the estimates.” But they didn’t. Commonsense PR would have told the top guy, at a time when the international newspapers were filled with pictures of oil-covered birds, that it wouldn’t be good to turn up at a major sailing regatta. Of course, the top guy, if he’d had any common sense in the first place, wouldn’t have dreamed of turning up at such an event. Which is why the top guy isn’t the top guy any longer.

But, even if they’ve amputated Tony Hayward, the bad PR goes on. Yesterday, BP’s top PR man, Andrew Gowers, told the New York Times that it wasn’t fair to suggest they had tried to spin themselves out of the catastrophe. “From the beginning of the crisis,” he said, “BP stepped forward and accepted responsibility.”

That’s not true, either. They agreed they had to try to cap the leak, because they had no choice. But they didn’t take the blame. In May, when they had to appear on Capitol Hill to explain themselves, they pointed the finger at two sub-contractors, who pointed the finger at each other. I don’t know what 10 years of Beyond Petroleum ads cost, but BP and its contracts erased any possible payoff in one spring day this year.

It was in sharp and continuing contrast to what happened, decades ago, when J&J discovered someone was putting cyanide in Tylenol capsules and that people purchasing those capsules were dying. They pulled the product off every pharmacy shelf and didn’t put it back until they’d found a way to prevent a recurrence. Simple. Obvious. Virtuous. And great PR.

The sad aspect of it is this. After all these years, the Tylenol case study stands alone. Despite the growth of the PR infrastructure, no other example comes readily to mind of a company facing disaster behaving so well.