05 Regression Practice

It’s Time to Re-Brand Green Branding: Lessons From Beyond Petroleum

[pic]By Paul Hannam, Bright Green Leadership | July 30th, 2010 [pic]0 Comments

[pic]The following is a post by Paul Hannam of Bright Green Leadership (a 3p sponsor) – offering internet marketing strategies for responsible businesses. This tips and observations in this series are aimed at green entrepreneurs looking to understand how internet technology can benefit them more.

[pic]For the last few weeks I have been writing about internet marketing and how green businesses should adopt best practices to sell more of their products online. In this post, I want to shift the focus to a broader and more topical subject. What does the Gulf Oil disaster mean for the practice of Green Branding and Green Marketing? What are the lessons for green businesses or corporations engaged in green marketing?

Even thinking about issues of green branding and green marketing might seem irrelevant, even trivial, considering the terrible human and environmental tragedy that we have watched unfold over the last three months.  Yet the oil spill has raised significant and unavoidable concerns about the credibility of green marketing, green branding and corporate social responsibility.

I used to teach a case study about how BP tried to change its brand from British Petroleum to Beyond Petroleum.  At the time, this seemed like an excellent green marketing strategy and, as a Brit myself, I was quite proud to contrast BP’s green efforts with those of Exxon who has been the number one enemy of environmentalists in Europe. This week, however, Greenpeace is demonstrating in London against BP, not Exxon. Activists have shut down some of BP’s gas stations in a highly visible and popular protest against what they see as corporate negligence on an epic scale.

So how has it all gone so horribly wrong? Is it simply that BP had the misfortune to be the particular corporation associated with this tragedy, rather than any one of...