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John Tantillo's Brand Winner... And Loser: GM and BP
Posted by The Marketing Doctor at 5/18/2010 8:24 AM 
Categories: Marketing, Branding
Tags: GM Tantillo brands BP Tony Hayward FOX bailout Tylenol taxpayers $865 million defensiveness Gulf of Mexico branding oil spill Hayward marketing
Categories: Marketing, Branding
Tags: GM Tantillo brands BP Tony Hayward FOX bailout Tylenol taxpayers $865 million defensiveness Gulf of Mexico branding oil spill Hayward marketing
| Brand Winner... | And Loser... |
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John Tantillo's Winner and Loser of the Week:
Winner: GM
Loser: BP
Winner
About a year ago, when many were proclaiming the end of GM, I asked this question over at Fox: What will they say when GM makes a profit?
At the time, many people —especially the all-seeing pundits of doom out there— seemed to believe that the company was finished. But the marketing lens said otherwise.
The marketing lens told me that GM has always been a company built around brands. People buy brands, not companies. GM, despite its myriad problems, is a company with terrific brands that people continue to want.
Basically, my argument (you can read it here you can read it here) was that as long as GM continued to focus on its brands, a trend that had been taking hold months before the government bailout, it would reemerge from its crisis stronger than ever.
Well, GM has just made its first profit since 2007: $865 million in its first quarter, as its revenue increased by 40%. Not bad for a company that was considered to be at death’s door just a few months ago.
Now, to be fair to the naysayers, my full prediction was not just about GM making a profit (which it now has) but ultimately turning a profit for taxpayers. After all, the Treasury still owns 61% of the company.
Many people are still skeptical, but I believe they are missing the key element here. The problem with GM was never a marketing problem; it was a managerial and financial problem. The company was encumbered by unwieldy pension obligations, et cetera. Most of that’s all cleared up now, leaving the individual brands, which have been getting better and better over the past decade, free to succeed.
Bottom line: it’s time to repeat the same question I asked last June: What will they say when GM makes a profit for the taxpayer? Because folks, it’s only a matter of time.
Loser
I usually don’t like to revisit a brand so soon after writing about it, but this week’s loser is last week’s loser.
Why?
Because BP’s CEO, Tony Hayward, managed to make a very bad situation even worse by opening his mouth.
As footage of his company’s mistake circled the globe, Hayward said: "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume."
This is utter verbal catastrophe and shows a lack of marketing strategy. It makes me think that even if BP hadn’t faced this disaster, the millions the company has spent on that “green” energy advertising campaign would have been wasted anyway.
I say wasted, because to have the top man in an organization show such incredible ignorance of the general perception of this event —even if he is under oil-geyser-like pressure that few of us can imagine— shows that there is no top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top marketing philosophy driving this company. I don’t like to say this, but this is madness! Period. End of story.
Let’s talk Tylenol for a minute. (Hayward probably needs to take a few.) I’m not talking about Tylenol’s recent challenges, but the Tylenol crisis of two and a half decades ago.
Tylenol faced its greatest marketing challenge during the tragic poisonings, and their approach set the standard for how a company should deal with a crisis that threatens the very life of the brand.
The marketing I’m talking about isn’t the smoke and mirrors, let’s-sell-product-at-any-cost variety. No. The kind of marketing that the folks behind Tylenol showed they knew was the kind of brand-caring, long-sighted, Target-market sensitive, value-building marketing that is found in the marketing DNA of the best companies.
In Tylenol’s case, even though they knew that the poisoning could have happened to almost any packaged goods company, they didn’t harp on this fact (i.e., no defensiveness, no ‘the gulf’s a very big ocean’). Instead, they decided that among other superb marketing outreach tactics to restore consumer confidence in their products, they would make the world safer for everyone by pioneering tamper-resistant packaging.
In short, they took the high road. The best marketing always does.
If BP’s listening, here are three actions to take, based on Tylenol’s own example:
1. Immediately announce that BP will be “adopting” the Gulf of Mexico and plans to make things cleaner than before. in other words, show that the company is going to have a long-term positive effect on shore ecosystems and the fishing industry. Perhaps develop partnerships with environmental organizations and the fishing industry to work toward long-term change.
2. Name whatever ingenious device you come up with to stop the spill something like “The BP Enviro-Safe Solution.” Then make this proprietary technology available to all oil companies. Also, announce that the company will be publishing and giving out The BP Spill Response Handbook. The BP-branded Handbook will be compiled from the findings of an expert panel that, months from now, will be able to provide valuable, environmentally protective lessons from this event.
3. Announce plans to create a second expert program to evaluate the accident causes thoroughly. This and the findings from step #2 might result in the development of other devices like universal fail-safes (named after BP), methods and protocols. Again, BP will be sharing this intellectual property, possibly even giving the devices away or selling at cost to the rest of the industry (mining, drilling and other resource companies).
Bottom line, BP can turn this situation around for itself and the world. It can take control of the story by having a long-term plan for past, present and future environmental responsibility.
Fact is that the company is already in a very large ocean of trouble. People can forgive accidents and they will —you don’t need to defend your brand against this. Defensiveness only serves to make you look guilty. But beyond merely forgiving, people will actually applaud the underdog who turns bad circumstances into a positive for everyone.
And, remember, things are always easier when you keep marketing and branding in mind.
TODAY'S TANTILLO TAKEAWAY -
The best marketing is about taking the high road.
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