| OCR Text |
Show 284 forces of the logo. The following section then takes a closer look at bp's image events and argues that even though bp attempted to reestablish lost trust from the oil spill and Tony Hayward's indiscretions, the effort to stabilize relations reasonably failed to regain the visual momentum achieved from its 2000 rebranding campaign. As damaging as Deepwater Horizon was to the affective force of bp's logo, bp's former chief executive, Tony Hayward, made matters worse. Hayward is remembered for his numerous PR gaffes, and he is particularly who Glenn DaGian refers to when he said bp sounded like "they were hiding behind lawyers' skirts." His statements were branded insincere, and this produced a corporate persona that people loved to hate. Through Hayward, bp became associated with avarice, lies, and selfishness. Julia Kollewe (2014) of The Guardian once said that Hayward was "the most hated man in America" (Kollewe, 2014, para. 1), and to Stanley Reed (2012) of The New York Times, "if there's a public villain of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill - one person who, rightly or not, will be remembered for the deadly blowout, the black slick and all that followed - it's probably Tony Hayward" (para. 1). A month after the spill, for instance, Hayward declared "the amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume" (quoted in Goodman, 2010, para. 35). And a few days later he said, "the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest" (quoted in Goodman, 2010, para. 36). Readers may also recall that he took a day off to sail the English Channel's Solent Strait during the peak of the disaster. "I'd like my life back" he said in what The New York Times called a "crisis-P.R. sound bite from hell" (Reed, 2012, para. 4). President Obama said that Hayward "wouldn't be working for me after any of those statements" (BBC, 2010, para. 2). |
