Image by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com via Flickr
Everyone is so busy (justifiably) bashing BP for the horrendous oil spill that they tend to forget that, just five years ago, BP came close to positioning itself as an environmental darling. So I just want to remind everyone, so the true irony of what’s happened in the Gulf isn’t lost.
Back in 2005, BP ran a campaign telling the world what it was doing to keep things green. And it coined one of the most brilliant environmental slogans I’ve seen in a long time: “It’s a start.” Why brilliant? Because it stopped environmentalists from attacking them for not doing enough.
Seeing the current BP mea culpas — and I must admit, I don’t find them as patently insincere as some critics, but I’m certainly not bowled over by them — reminds me of a piece I wrote back then, about how companies were falling all over themselves to advertise their green-ness — even if their actual performance didn’t warrant it. Here’s BP’s fairly straightforward acknowledgment of why:
“Investors choose whose stock to buy; consumers choose whose gas they buy; and governments choose who gets their contracts,” said Scott Dean, a spokesman for BP, which alternates “Beyond Petroleum” and “It’s a Start” as its tag lines. “We’re going to invest $8 billion in alternative energy in the next 10 years, so, of course, we’re advertising that.”
But unlike Ford, GE and the host of other companies that were crowding each other on the environmental bandwagon — many of which certainly had a better green track record than BP — only BP came up with a bullet-proof slogan. And environmentalists, albeit ruefully, conceded that they were trumped.
“When BP says ‘It’s a Start,’ it’s acknowledging that even the positive steps they are taking are not enough, so we really can’t criticize them for not doing more right away,” said Michelle Chan-Fishel, program manager for green investments at Friends of the Earth. “In that sense, it’s really a clever campaign.”
So, looking at what’s transpired since, BP gets an F for performance, but it still gets an A for rhetoric. Would that the grades were reversed.
new bottom line 