BP has taken an awful reputational hit and it hurts in all sorts of ways

Having got up at sparrow’s fart this morning to talk about reputation on Radio 4’s Today programme, I might as well keep my train of thought moving along.

I’ve always thought the character who understands the value of reputation best is Iago who tells Othello:  ’Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,/Is the immediate jewel of their souls…he that filches from me my good name/Robs me of that which not enriches him/And makes me poor indeed.’

BP’s name has taken a terrible drubbing this year and the company feels a good deal poorer both literally and in Shakespeare’s sense as a result. In three weeks’ time, we announce the winners of our Most Admired Companies Awards, the nation’s top corporate reputation barometer – and I don’t think I’m allowing any cats out of the bag by telling you that BP aren’t going to be collecting any gongs at Claridges in 2010.

BP did plenty wrong in their response to Deepwater Horizon, both practically and in the PR realm. Hayward may have felt he wanted his ‘life back’ – who wouldn’t in his position? – but it isn’t a good idea to voice that sort of sentiment in that situation. He may not have seen his son for three months, but being pictured on a boat with him on the oil-free Solent was another poor call (they should have taken a quiet corner table at Pizza Express in Havant). And saying, as he does on tonight’s Money Programme, that he did Geology at university rather than attending RADA unfortunately doesn’t cut the mustard in the modern comms world.

But there’s no doubt that there was a vicious anti-British political animus against British Petroleum coming from Rahm Emanuel and others at the White House. That didn’t do anyone any good and further fanned the flames of a nasty xenophobia that threatens the most powerful, and usually open, nation on earth. The President’s own Commission has today said that it can find no evidence that BP put cost above safety.

Does anyone think for one moment that bad stuff doesn’t happen in the oil game in Russia, Nigeria or China? You just don’t hear about it. My suspicion is that BP’s safety record is not that much worse than its competitors’. The others just got lucky. With all the concentration on carbon and global warming over recent years, the world has forgotten that getting oil out of the ground remains a dirty, dangerous business. It’s not like making yogurt – and as the black stuff runs out, extracting the final drops will become more difficult and more dangerous.

The other area of corporate reputation that interests me is its relationship to choice. There will be plenty of motorists over the last few months who consciously or otherwise fill up at a Shell or an Esso garage, rather than a BP one. There will also be good-quality graduates entering the extractive industries who take offers from BHP Billiton or Total rather than BP, because they feel uneasy working for a sinner.

Competition is good for reputation building and protection. The businesses with the worst reputations tend to be where consumers cannot go elsewhere. Today, the state of much of our public transport in the UK is grim. And it’s going to get worse, according to the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons, because there isn’t any money to invest, and there isn’t any incentive for the private sector to invest, either. Transport for London sits in the basement with the Royal Mail for a seriously poor name. But they get away with it because one of the great failures of transport privatisation is that it didn’t provide any true competition. Thus, commuters into the UK’s big cities put up with the highest fares in the world and some of the poorest service. I’d rather have Tony Hayward running the tubes than Bob Crow and the current management shower any day.