This is a hot topic at the moment. Not a day has gone by since the end of April that BP has not received negative coverage in the media, both in the U.S. and pretty much everywhere else on the back of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
BP is responsible for what is widely acknowledged to be the worst oil spill in U.S. history and, at the forefront of their public relations campaign for much of the last few weeks, is BP CEO and media punch bag, Tony Hayward. Not an enviable position to be in, by any means.
The explosion on the BP oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico that occurred on April 20th was undoubtedly an operations failure. Mr. Hayward, who has become known via Newsweek as ‘the bumbler from BP’, can not be held directly accountable for this.
However, since these catastrophic events, which resulted in the deaths of 11 workers, he has been scapegoated by the media for his numerous blunders. Last Saturday’s Financial Times led on its front page with ‘BP braced for shake-up at the top’, with a sub-headline suggesting ‘Hayward likely casualty’. This scapegoating must be hard to endure but Hayward has done himself few favours in the media spotlight.
From the very get go, BP’s PR has itself been a disaster. From a communications perspective, the question that is increasingly being asked is: was BP actively trying to reduce its culpability, or was it simply incompetent?
The document given to the U.S. Congress claiming only 5,000 barrels of oil would be leaked a day, and at worst, 60,000, was contradicted by a leaked internal document stating that up to 100,000 barrels could be leaking in to the Gulf every day. At best, this was a serious mistake. Hayward’s subsequent attempts to shift the blame onto Transocean - the company from which BP leased the rig - backfired and, if anything, worsened perceptions of BP.
But things got worse still. In an interview with the UK Guardian, he suggested that the Gulf of Mexico is so large that the amount of oil spilled was tiny, in relative terms. Regardless of how true this may or may not be, 100,000 barrels of oil leaking into the sea - every day - can not be made to sound like a drop in any ocean, for the man or woman on the street.
Hayward’s lack of empathy with those who have suffered from the disaster - and the list grows every day - combined with half hearted attempts at justification have done little to protect either his reputation or that of BP. Another low point arose when images reached the press of oil-drenched birds on the southern coast of the U.S., and Hayward told Sky News: “I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest”.
However, probably Hayward’s worst faux pas was the plaintive plea: “I would like my life back”. Set against the deaths of 11 oil rig workers and thousands of ruined livelihoods, not to mention the potentially irreversible damage to the environment, this staggering lack of consideration indicated both exceptionally poor judgement and a remarkable inability to sense the mood of stakeholders, both within BP and in the wider world.
And then he went sailing. While the fall out from the disaster continued, Hayward took part in a yacht race around the Isle of Wight which got the backs up of everyone in Washington, prompting the White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, to make disparaging remarks about Hayward’s lack of PR skills.
To cap it all off, BP have now been accused of burning turtles. Conservationists in the Gulf of Mexico have witnessed sea turtles that were once on the brink of extinction - as if this could get any worse - being killed in burn fields. They have estimated 425 have been killed so far. Not that BP’s environmental plan could be trusted, as it listed a wildlife expert who died in 2005 as a consultant.
The plan also outlined how walruses could be affected by the spill. There are no walruses in the Gulf. These faults aren’t necessarily directly attributable to Hayward but, at a time when BP is under greater scrutiny than any other organisation in the world, they show that the company, regardless of its wealth, has been completely unprepared to manage the crisis.
This is especially noteworthy because, generally speaking, an organisation’s crisis preparedness is much higher, depending on the possible impact of an accident or mishap at that organisation on the wider world. For example, an accident at a chemical plant or oil refinery will potentially have a huge impact on the surrounding environment. So the larger companies in these industries will usually have exceptionally comprehensive crisis management plans in place. But BP, one of the most vaunted names in the global petroleum industry, floundered.
It is important to note here that it was genuinely an operations failure that the oil flow was not stopped. There were two sets of failed attempts, the first by remotely operated underwater vehicles and the second when huge quantities of cement were used in an effort to plug the well head. The reality is that there is little or nothing that PR can do to solve the problem, when a company is embroiled in this kind of disaster.
But what BP should have done through to its communications was to, firstly, acknowledge the scale of the disaster, not obscure it. Secondly, it should have actively sought to reassure all stakeholders, from the U.S. President to the world’s media to Louisiana fishermen, that the company understood the impact of the problem and was completely focused on finding a solution. Instead, the CEO went for a boat trip.
Thirdly, it should have apologised a lot quicker than it did. Closer to home, we have recently seen how the apology from British Prime Minister David Cameron to those who were bereaved on Bloody Sunday went a long way towards easing the suffering of the relatives of the slain.
Fourthly, however, BP should have made damn sure that it had the right spokesperson out front for the crisis. Hayward’s professional credentials are impeccable - an oilman to his bootstraps - but it looks like the company should have moved a lot quicker to replace him as the face of BP. Instead, Hayward dug himself further into the mire as the oil bubbled up from the ocean floor.
The recent decision by BP to appoint company executive Bob Dudley to manage the clean up shows that it has belated recognised its myriad failings, in operational and communications terms, in the wake of the disaster. In a PR context, Dudley’s origins - he is a native of Mississippi, a Gulf Coast state - mean that he will hopefully be better placed to understand the anger of those worst affected by the spill.
Fundamentally, the whole episode shows that no amount of slick PR tools or careful message management can make an organisation look good when it is clearly guilty of such epic mismanagement. But PR does have a critical role to play openly and transparently communicating BP’s contrition and its continuing efforts to achieve a solution.
PR needs to craft a strategy through which a whole range of audiences - media, legislative decision makers, politicians, and a plethora of others - are kept fully abreast of every relevant step in curbing the leak and addressing the damage to date.
It’s a thankless job, in many ways. BP and Hayward will be hate figures among residents of the U.S. Gulf Coast and environmentalists everywhere for decades to come. But, if the right decisions are made, BP can at least communicate the steps that it is taking to reach a solution and the changes that it is making to ensure that any chance of a re-occurrence is minimised. In this, BP - but perhaps not Tony Hayward - will have all of our best interests at heart.
There is little doubt that the lecturers in Marketing and PR will have documented every nuance of this fiasco and it will be used from now on as the “how not to” case study for decades of future students, at the other end of the spectrum from the Perrier “how to handle” a PR disaster properly.
Otherwise, what disturbs me from this disaster is threefold.
Firstly, the antipathy with which those in charge of such a firm could care less about its outrageous disregard for safety. The blow-out preventer that failed was 20 years old and wasn’t serviced by the firm that built it to save money.
Secondly, Like the banking industry, the oil trade has resisted all the attempts at adequate regulation which might have spotted this problem a long time ago and saved 11 lives.
Thirdly, is the seeming return of the ugly trait of isolationism in the USA, where as soon as it was revealed the problem was BP’s, it seemed far easier to blame them bloody foreigners rather than look inward at why fat housewives need a five litre vehicle to collect the mail in the morning, and insatiable national requirement for the product that allows this.