Disasters can fun sport for us in advertising. Full blown nightmares are even better, the chance for all of us to crow from the sidelines and belittle those that would try to emerge from the wreckage intact. Peter Arnell and the Tropicana packaging last year? That was fun. Spirit Airlines? Constant fun. And no one has done a better job at painting a big bullseye on themselves than our good friends at British Petroleum.

Mind you, the abuse is well deserved, and their ability to keep shooting themselves in the foot is almost bordering on epic. But as a case study in what we marketing people do (that would be marketing), it presents an interesting conflict. Sure, nobody actually want this gig, and I am sure most of us would be happy to spend our skills and experience firing BP CEO Tim Hayward’s head into the geyser rather than golf balls. But then again, ask yourself the following question:

What would you do?

That’s right you mocking masses. Not that I am condoning BP’s actions in any way, but if you were in charge of leading their marketing at this point in time, what would you recommend? Many PR experts are out there saying they should do nothing. Mind you, these are the same experts who during other moments of corporate catastrophe say the worst thing you can do is go silent.  Some advertising people are saying keep  running ads, while others say that no ad on the planet is going to move the needle for them right now.

What would you do? And where would you do it? Is this a marketing problem? Is it a PR problem? Is this a place where the smaller footprint of social media would be best deployed? Or maybe is it a combination of all the above, and this is just another example of how today’s brands live in all these worlds at the same time.

We always talk here at Palmer about Fluid Brands, that your brand is not just affected by your marketing, but also is constantly being pulled and pushed by external dynamics too. Every time a competitor launches an ad or product, it creates a new rock in the river. Every review, blog entry and community comment changes the flow of the river. A Fluid Brands can adapt, can alter its course to move around obstructions, find new currents to ride and generate energy in different places. In the case of BP, have the external forces overwhelmed the brand, or is there a way the brand can flow to a new course?

This week we are doing things a little differently. For a lack of a better word, we are going to crowdsource the rest of the this article and leave it up to all of you to decide what, if anything, BP can do at this point. The momentum is not in your favor. The client is hellbent on self-immolation. You have to fight articles that are pounding every decision. Just when you launch a new television commercial here comes Jimmy Kimmel to blow you to pieces. And your real Twitter feed has about 15,000 followers while the annoying and quite hysterical fake BP Twitter feed has over 175,000 followers. And has also “tweetnapped” your #bpcares hashtag.

So, what would you do?

Tags: BP, British Petroleum, Crowdsource, Fluid Brands, Jimmy Kimmel, Tim Hayward

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 at 10:47 am and is filed under Fluid Brands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.