Marketing and Research

BP Oil: Marketing to Repair the Damage

British Petroleum’s (commonly known as BP) discovery of oil in the Gulf of Mexico in 2009 brought them to the top three of oil producers in the United States, reaching a goal of 300,000 barrels of oil per day (Reed, 2009). This discovery, although very profitable to BP, also lead to the Deepwater Horizon Catastrophe on April 20, 2010 where a drilling rig exploded off of the coast of Louisiana. It took BP three months to be able to seal the pipeline while excessive amounts of oil were gushing into the Gulf’s water. Luc Bardin, BP’s Chief Marketing Officer conceded that the company would have a difficult road ahead to repair the damage done by the spill in the Golf; for the first time the company is not at the top of its market (Durrani, 2010).

BP is a company that has marketed green initiative and positive environmental impact; the company had “flooded the media with advertisements showing solar panels, windmills and waving fields of grass without a drop of oil in sight” for nearly ten year prior to the spill (Daley, 2010). Green marketing for BP pulled blinders onto consumer’s eyes, shielding them from the image of it being one of the largest oil producers in the United States. The green marketing initiative for BP Oil was very successful – I am not sure many other oil companies could have the population believing that they were a green company. BP’s white gloves were oil soaked as soon as some of the consequences of the oil spill began to emerge in the media and this significantly damaged their brand image with consumers.

This environmental disaster brought a lot of negative publicity to BP and the company faced heavy criticism from both consumers and the government (Harlow, 2011). BP’s social responsibility and ethics have even come into question, many debating whether it is ethical for a company to market themselves green if in fact they are not (Balmer, 2011). Green marketing is no longer going to be enough for BP to...