In my last post I spoke about how many companies and brands are not yet engaging with their market. This in some cases despite their stakeholders actively seeking answers, and in other cases with circumstances demanding them.

This casualness is costing companies in a number of ways. Corporate Social Investment and customer service are just two areas that are suffering, and any failure in these will inevitably result in bottom-line losses. These two facets of corporate activities are by no means the only areas that this series of posts alludes to but I feel that they should suffice to get my point across.

A Step and a Stumble
Last year during my studies I came across an anonymous case-study focusing on BP. The author mentioned an environmentally friendly drive that BP had undertaken. Take a look at this petrol station in Hornchurch, England. It's almost like something out of a Utopian sci-fi movie. It utilises extensive solar energy, innovative waste management, and has begun to make an effort to attract as much local wildlife as possible.

It provided the world with a vision of the future. Sure, there's the tiny fact that its main purpose is to supply fossil fuels but at least it was a statement of intent. It showed that BP was aware of the damage its other petrol stations were causing and that it realised that it needed to take preventative action. It could have proved to be the first step in a more eco-friendly “creative destruction”, the self-reengineering that Theodore Levitt claims in his Marketing Myopia that all companies have to go through in order to survive.

One would have expected such a move to have been welcomed by all stakeholders – it's a move that took guts and showed the world that BP is aware that it has to change. Instead, since opening the Hornchurch Station in 2002 BP has regularly been included in the Greenwash top 5. I.e. the world feels like BP is simply trying to polish its image without really affecting any change. One can only speculate at BP's true intentions. What we can say with hindsight is that even if BP had the best environmental and philanthropic interests at heart, any move would probably have been greeted by scepticism.

The problem was that BP's reputation preceded it and the world just didn't buy it. Some people didn't get this sudden change of focus – sustainability reporting and corporate social responsibility are relatively new and remain foreign notions to most outside of the corporate world. Others didn't buy it - they just couldn't see enough of BP's new corporate vision to believe that this was anything more than a propaganda ploy with no substance behind it.
Now BP finds itself as an “honorary” Greenwash member, and my inbox gets inundated with e-mails from my friends outlining cunning ploys to boycott BP for a month and bring the vile monster to its knees. Not where I think they were aiming to end up after their re-branding.

BP and its environmental concerns serve as only one example of what I'm trying to get at. To be a true leader and a success story in the corporate world it is imperative that you have your finger on the pulse of your market. You need to know where you stand, how your consumers perceive you and what luggage you're carrying from previous endeavours. And over and above this you need to be able to not only pre-empt how they'll react to you, but also put yourself in a position to react to the unforeseeable as quickly and decisively as possible. Now, more than ever before, this is feasible.

There's one more post coming in this series where I'm going to try and show some ways how BP and others can make use of our current commercial and technological landscape to better communicate with their marketplace, thereby more effectively managing their reputation and simultaneously maximise what their customers take from their relationships with the brand.

On top of this Smith posted a great link on his comment to my last post which I feel deserves a post of its own.