BP media mis-steps: Incompetent PR or arrogant leadership?

I can’t help but consider the past six weeks of corporate responses from BP regarding the Atlantis Platform disaster. The initial response in the first week was bad enough to warrant a typical blog entry about proper PR, compare the obvious textbook Tylenol case, but I thought that too banal. Yet as time passes, the official responses continue to be not only awful, but awful in a colossal, ongoing, repeating, self defeating, ignorant sort of way that underscores that BP executives are far better at talking than listening. Or doing.

The spill in the Gulf is now the largest ecological disaster ever in the United States. (BP needs to thank the gross incompetence that led to the tragedies and human toll at Bhopal and Chernobyl for keeping them off the top of the ‘worldwide’ list. For now.) So let us consider for a moment what it must be like at BP headquarters:

Consider the boardroom dialogue at HQ that allowed BP CEO Tony Hayward to say to a UK newspaper that “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.”

What of the urgent meetings among top executives that ended with the suggestion that BP stick to initial estimates of 1,000 barrels per day of leaking oil, when many independent experts were saying up to 20,000? Did they think the public – including experts in flow measurement – weren’t ever going to find out?

What of the casual water cooler conversations between cubicles where idiotic comments that the company “doesn’t know how birds and marine life have died” were allowed to be shared – and then implicitly encourage public opinion pieces about how the wildlife damage is minimal – “only being a little oil on a couple bird’s wings”.

Not to mention apparently very little comment regarding the eleven men who lost their lives when the platform exploded. (The media is complicit in their attention to the ‘pipe cam” over the human toll.)

There are more examples. Many, many more, as the list of mis-steps is as long as the oil slick is wide. But can we blame the PR team? Well, insomuch as an OIL COMPANY apparently had no, or a poor, or not agreed upon, disaster response process in place, yes. But even at that, it is often the corporate executives, regularly relegating PR (and marketing) to the back of the bus and out of the boardroom, that are likely to blame here. Instead of allowing these critical communication professionals to help manage the disaster communications, designate executive spokespeople, and align messages, BP simply sent employees a reminder of the Non-Disclosure Agreements in their contracts and then continued blathering unbelievable statements like a five-year-old caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

Until the disaster, the BP marketing and public relations team was doing an excellent job redefining BP (which holds the worst safety record in the industry), as a leader in eco-friendly oil production and alternative energy. But corporate PR can only do so much. Eventually, words must be backed with action if a brand makeover is to ‘stick’.

Even at BP, I suspect their PR professionals understand this. Unfortunately, their executives never have.