Location, location, location - the oldest cliché in the book about Retail. Get the right outlet with the right products in the right place and the customers and the profits just roll in! And in the petroleum sector it has to be even truer surely. Right road, right traffic flow, well positioned petrol station - Bingo! Well yes of course location is vital - that's why the real estate costs so much when a site on a busy highway or on a motorway is released or sold. But as every retailer knows the trick is always to maximise the returns - to secure volume and income which exceeds expectations and provides business higher than the "case" assumption (the assumption that underpinned the original investment). This article is about that extra, that bonus level of return that can turn a good site or network into a great one.
One of the basic rules of retail is that it has to be process driven. Securing and maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction does not happen by chance – especially in petroleum retailing. This means that the “offer” has not only to meet the customers’ needs but also to be consistent over time. Any fool can get a consumer to try a product or service once – but to bring them back time and time again you have to repeat the quality, and precisely replicate the purchase experience, every time. This requires performance standards – standards which cover every aspect of the motorist’s visit to the petrol station. Where, as is invariably the case, sites are part of a branded network your standards must cover the network as a whole. Most oil companies have some flagship sites in prime locations on which they lavish special care and attention. There is nothing wrong with this – providing that the minimum standards which apply elsewhere in the network meet, or preferably exceed, customer expectations. Consistency of the marketing offer is vital.
Vertically integrated oil companies, those that operate all the way along the supply chain from the wellhead to the motorist, are driven by processes. Technical and performance standards apply at every step in the chain – so it is not surprising that there is generally, in principle, an acceptance of the need for standards in their retailing operations as well. I say “in principle” advisedly because my personal experience in Shell, and my observation of other oil companies, is that particularly in recent years there is an unwillingness to make the financial commitment in retail that would facilitate the achievement of consistently high levels of customer service. The principal reason for this is that whereas other retailers are customer obsessed – the success of a Wal-Mart or a Tesco is built on the foundation of a fixation with customers – this hardly ever applies to traditional oil companies. This is part of the reason that supermarket and hypermarket chains have made such inroads into petroleum retailing. When the board of a supermarket giant meets virtually every subject discussed is placed in the context of its effect on customer preference and consumer choice. When the boards of Shell or BP or ExxonMobil meet there retail business is low down the agenda – if it is there at all – and the customer rarely gets a look in.

This brings us to the question as to whether retail is or should be a core competence for a vertically integrated oil company. Back in 1996 I moved, with Shell, to the Middle East – based in Dubai. My previous job had been as project manager for the re-imaging of Shell’s more than 40,000 petrol stations around the world – so I considered myself something of an expert on branded retailing in the petroleum sector and I thought also that Shell had created a new, distinctive and customer-driven set of design and operational standards. What immediately surprised me in Dubai is how high the general standards of petroleum retailing were - and all the brands were local brands. For example Emarat, a Dubai company, had a new design and associated forecourt standards which were, frankly, just as good as what we had just developed for Shell. The key point about Emarat is that they are first and foremost a consumer focused marketing company. Of course in a country like the United Arab Emirates, with its huge oil reserves, there are also major upstream companies but the nation’s oil marketing brands are decoupled from their upstream activities. Like Tesco or Wal-Mart, Emarat and their competitors are 100% focused on their motorist and other customers. This I believe is also the model for the future for the multinationals like Shell and BP.

The reality is that the main raison d’être of a vertically integrated oil major these days has to be the upstream. Most of their investment and almost all of their energies are focused on this sector – particularly at Board level. Although the marketing businesses of these companies are large, and their brands have traditionally been strong, whatever advantage there once was has gradually been whittled away by the supermarket chains. The consumer brands are also damaged by completely unrelated issues and problems in the upstream – as BP has recently seen to their cost. So the crucial decision that Shell and BP and the rest must take is whether they do still see marketing, and especially retail, as a core business and if so how they should restructure to give it far more emphasis than it can receive when most of the corporation’s efforts are on the upstream. Core businesses demand the development of distinctive core competences – peripheral businesses, however notionally large, wither on the vine because the core competences are absent or insufficiently developed.

There is a window of opportunity for Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Total etc to focus on what they do best – the upstream – and realise the value of their marketing businesses and brands. There are plenty of models which could be followed to do this of which probably the best would be the one chosen some years ago by British Gas plc when they formed two separate companies, one essentially upstream (BG Group) and the other a marketing business - Centrica. If there is residual value in the brands such as BP, Amoco, Shell, Total, Texaco, Esso, Mobil, Elf and the rest then the creation of dedicated downstream companies to manage these brands entirely separately from the upstream is essential. The question as to whether retail is a core competence would then never need to be asked. Retail would be the main business, the public face and the raison d’être of these new companies – and their management would have to be just as customer obsessed as their supermarket competitors!


Paddy Briggs

July 2010

© Minale Tattersfield

Belgium is world famous for the quality of its chocolate so when 10 Belgian masters of chocolate join together to showcase their art you know that something impressive is about to happen.

Best Belgian Chocolate of the World is a non profit making organisation dedicated to protecting and promoting the expertise of Belgian chocolate making. They decided to set up a retail outlet where the art of the Belgian ‘chocolatier’ could be experienced at first hand. It was to be a place not only where chocolate could be purchased but where one could see the chocolate being made and witness the skills of the chocolate masters.


Minale Tattersfield design strategy created the branding from the name “La Maison des Maîtres Chocolatiers Belges” right through to the interior design.

The visual identity design was expressed very simply in line with the whole concept itself. A light blue and a brown were the colours used in the identity and this was then followed through in the design of the communication material and the in-store point of sale. The simplicity of the design and the use of brown throughout really emphasise the purity of the recipes and the ‘love’ of chocolate.

In my previous article in this series I argued strongly that the main determinant of a company's reputation was its behaviour not its rhetoric. The ongoing calamity of BP's Deepwater Horizon continues to put corporate reputation as a subject very much in the spotlight and, hardly surprisingly, many commentators contrast BP's past attempts to claim the moral highground on environmental matters with the stark reality of what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico. The idea that corporations should be "socially responsible" whilst fashionable is not new - and it remains an extremely controversial concept. In this article I will try and delve into what Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) really means - and argue that all too often CSR has been just a tool of a company's reputation management/Public Relations activities rather than something that sets strict behavioural norms. In all too many cases CSR reports are selective, partial and glossy window-dressing - leading to charges of "Greenwash" - rather than true reflections of a corporation's actual non-financial (Health, Safety, Environment etc.) performance.
It is no exaggeration to say that that over the past two hundred years or so virtually everything that we value - even take for granted - about our way of life has happened because of the operation of regulated free markets. I put the adjective "regulated" in this statement not to over-emphasise the need for laws, rules and controls but to suggest that whilst the principal driver of progress and change has been the action of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial corporations a measure of regulation has always been necessary. If the first half of the nineteenth century was the age of untrammelled industrial growth the 150 years since then has been no less spectacular - but there has been, as there needed to be, increasing legal restraint on corporate behaviour.

There has always been the same dynamic underway between free-enterprise companies and regulators - mainly governments. The companies from Standard Oil through Philip Morris to Microsoft always argue that any regulation of their freedoms will inhibit their business to the disadvantage of their customers and, most important of all, their shareholders. They harp back, in spirit if not always in rhetoric, to Adam Smith who said:

"Every individual endeavours to employ his capital so that its produce may be of the greatest value. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own security, only his own gain... [but] by pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than he really intends to promote it". Adam Smith in "the Wealth of Nations". 1776

The argument of Smith was that the pursuit of self-interest is inevitable and desirable and that an unintended consequence is that society is thereby "effectually" promoted. This theory is a bit like "trickle-down economics" - let us entrepreneurs get on with running businesses and benefits will cascade to all - even the worthy poor. Well not long after Smith his theory was tested as the nineteenth century Industrial revolution took hold in Europe and the United States. Before the century was out a raft of legislation was enacted to restrain industry as it became abundantly clear that whilst industrialisation brought many benefits it brought horrendous unintended consequences as well - from child labour to exploitation of workers to unsafe working conditions and monopoly power - and more. The break-up of the monopolistic Standard Oil in 1911 was amongst the most dramatic of instances where Government saw the need to restrain business in the public interest - but there are hundreds of other examples. It is no exaggeration to say that each successive wave of legislation was resisted by business - and that companies often claimed that self-regulation would be sufficient and that laws were unnecessary. In more modern times we have seen the tobacco industry fighting tooth and nail not to have to restrain the promotion of their brands and products - and we have seen self-interested bodies like the International Advertising Association (IAA) supporting them. To this day the IAA says, in respect of tobacco advertising, that they "…believe in the right to truthfully and responsibly advertise legal products to appropriate audiences and oppose efforts to restrict such advertising." The "Mad Men" live on!

The reason for this lengthy preamble on the history of regulation is to put the modern-day CSR debate into a historical context. There has always been a battle between legislators and businesses and one of the business defences has always been "Trust us - what we do is in the public interest and we accept the responsibility to police ourselves". However that most free-market of all economists, Milton Friedman, poured scorn on the idea that companies could or should be self-regulating over and above their legal obligations. Here is what Friedman said in 1962:

"The doctrine of "social responsibility" [is a] fundamentally subversive doctrine in a free society … in such a society there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud." Milton Friedman in "Capitalism and Freedom" 1962

Whatever else he might have been Friedman was no hypocrite and he abhorred obfuscation and window-dressing. Whilst he would no doubt have had no problem with the idea of lobbying to influence legislators he would have resisted any "voluntary codes" and overblown statements of "Business Principles". What, for example, would he have thought of this statement in the 1999 Annual Report of a major American corporation "Our philosophy is not to stand in the way of our employees, so we don't insist on hierarchical approval. We do, however, keep a keen eye on how prudent they are and rigorously evaluate and control the risk involved in each of our activities"? Whilst Friedman might have applauded the broad sentiment he would not of course have condoned any illegal behaviour and lack of internal controls. When the true story of Enron (for this is from their Report) emerged then Friedman's general position was vindicated. Enron did not stay "within the rules of the game" and broke the law in almost everything that they did. Whatever self-policing there was (and most of it was in reality non-existent) failed abysmally.

Enron lied about most things so it is not surprising that they lied about their internal controls. But much less venal companies fall into a similar trap in some of their rhetoric - not least in their so-called commitment to the principles of Sustainable Development. Here, for example, is what Mark Moody-Stuart said on the subject when he was head of Shell: “[Sustainability] is a three-legged stool balanced between economic, environment and social considerations”. This type of rhetoric has been common amongst those who believe that companies' commitments to CSR really are meaningful - it is par for the course. Milton Friedman would have been horrified at the underlying premise of the "three-legged stool" - that there is a precise equivalence between a company's economic driver and its social and environmental behaviours. Note that there has to be equivalence if the metaphor is to work. If one leg is longer than the others the stool is unbalanced and falls over! In reality, as we see time and time again, the economic driver is far, far more important than any incidental social and environmental obligations that a company may propound. The line of questioning that BP CEO Tony Hayward faced recently in the U.S. Congress was substantially about whether cost and profit issues (Economic) had outweighed Environmental considerations in BP's decision making regarding Deepwater Horizon.

So history teaches us that we should be deeply sceptical about any corporation's claim to self-regulation or allusion to "Principles" over and above their legal obligations. Not least because the directors of corporations have a statutory and fiduciary duty always to act in the interest of shareholders - and shareholders interests are monetary above all. A shareholder wants stock prices to perform well and dividends to be good - and that's about it! And the directors want the same thing - their bonuses, stock options and performance-related remuneration rely on it! So the more self-righteous and superior companies seem to be in their CSR statements the more sceptical we should be! Some companies make their position on social responsibility matters crystal clear and with a pleasing lack of hype. The often-vilified Ryanair is one. In their "Code of Ethics" they say:

"Ryanair is committed to conducting business in an ethical fashion that complies with all laws and regulations in the countries in which Ryanair operates. As employees and representatives of Ryanair, we must consider how our actions affect the integrity and credibility of the Company as a whole"
Contrast this frankness (Friedman would have been proud of Ryanair!) with the page after page of "Business Principles" bombast and self-congratulatory hype in the Annual Report of British American Tobacco which includes the following two "core beliefs" (there are a dozen or so more of these platitudes):

• We believe our businesses should uphold high standards of behaviour and integrity.

• We believe that high standards of corporate social responsibility should be promoted within the tobacco industry.

This from a corporation that actively seeks to promote its brands and noxious products wherever it can - especially in the developing world! If ever there was an oxymoronic statement it is the idea of "corporate social responsibility …within the tobacco industry". Mad Men again!

Multinational corporations sometimes claim that their commitments to Corporate Social Responsibility are such that they always apply their own global standards of behaviour - which means that their own CSR standards will override local standards where those local standards are lower. BP, for example, says "We’re proud to set universal standards of behaviour across our entire operation…developing our own set of rigorous guidelines - [which are] often more rigorous than local laws and regulations". Intellectually, of course the logic of this is inescapable. If your CSR commitment is absolute then even if you don't legally need to apply your standards you will do so anyway - because that is what you believe in. Sadly, however, this is all too often a chimera. As The Guardian's environment correspondent John Vidal put it recently in respect of BP's Gulf of Mexico problems "If this accident had occurred in a developing country, say off the west coast of Africa or Indonesia, BP could probably have avoided all publicity and escaped starting a clean-up for many months." Vidal is right. Similarly if Shell had been treating an oil field in the U.S. or Europe in the way that it has its assets in the Niger Delta, where 2,000 major spillage sites have never been cleaned up, then the political and media fallout would be similar to what BP is now struggling with in the United States.

So what does Corporate Social Responsibility really mean? It is not about putting a favourable gloss on a company's activities and drawing a veil over its less salubrious actions. It is not about being a generous donor to charities, however commendable that may be - you cannot buy yourself a good reputation by making donations to good causes. It is not about a re-branding or stakeholder engagement programme - however useful such things may be from time to time. What it is about is first and foremost obeying the law - and then, if you believe it is necessary and in the interests of shareholders, going the extra mile in respect of your health, safety, environment and community relations behaviour (etc.). It means respecting all your stakeholders - especially including those, like suppliers of goods and services and often employees and sub-contractors, over whom you may have the whip hand. These commitments have to be codified, managed, funded and rigorously and consistently applied. In my view there are few if any big companies and perhaps no multinational corporations that have such a commitment and act with such integrity - although some of course are better than others. Which is why it is only by regulation at a national and international level that society at large can be protected - history teaches us nothing less!

Paddy Briggs
June 2010
© Minale Tattersfield

Chances are there is a new dark ‘Hunter Green’ McDonalds near you by now. As a response to negative market research, critical city centre planning authorities, declining sales and fierce competition from the likes of Starbucks, the famous bright red frontage has been replaced by green in order to communicate to customers that McDonalds had changed some of its much publicised unethical ways. McDonalds appears now more of a restaurant than the petrol stations they frequently cohabit. The interiors too are less brash and feature modern art and subtle lighting showing that McDonalds understands the masses have become more discerning and sophisticated.

Delivering on the green promise includes a pledge that delivery vehicles run on recycled chip fat, packaging is recyclable and refrigerators run on non-ozone depleting refrigerants. To quote Jamie Oliver, gastro campaigner and entrepreneur ‘Being commercial and caring can work. Actually it’s the future’. Even Greenpeace have praised McDonalds for moving in the right direction (although it’s doubtful the charge of complicity in making the world obese will ever diminish).

Caltex’s Star Mart was in need of refreshment having warn the same red/turquoise wave identity for at least 14 years. The designers Hulsbosch rightly claim that the new logo shows “Warmth, personality and fun” is which is befitting of an offer which makes no great claim over and above providing speedy refreshment for the motorist. But whether the new ‘Star Man’ identity is truly contemporary as declared by the designers remains a question according to comments posted on the Australian media website mumbrella.

If mumbrella’s readers are as we suspect hyper critical graphic designers tired of such a familiar ‘Star Man’ visual pun then no doubt they would explain that using the Caltex star from the symbol and name was too obvious a starting point for the refreshed identity…..which is possibly why the previous designers avoided such a ‘gift’ in order to communicate the innovative nature of the offer in the mid 90’s.

Things have moved on, others are offering equal and superior offers and possibly required more thinking ‘Out the box’….see ‘Picknpay’, ‘On the Run’, ‘Wild Been Café, ‘Mesra’, 'Bonjour', ‘Sainsbury’s Local’, ‘Marks and ‘Spencer Simply Food’ and ‘Tesco Express’.

As ever it’s not what graphic designers think that matters and actual trading figures from 500 Australian sites will determine whether the rest of Caltex’s network in Asia and Africa will see more of the same.

The maintenance of a good corporate reputation in today's febrile multimedia age is no easy task - not least because the needs of a company's various stakeholders are all too often contradictory. Investors may seek cost efficiencies which boost earnings and dividends whilst employees seek job security. The need to boost the resource base, especially for oil and gas companies, will often conflict with the needs of local communities and environmentalists. And in some industries, like tobacco, the very nature of the business activity itself can be hard to defend and virtually incapable of being painted in a positive light. So does that mean that there are no firm guidelines that can be established to help companies manage their reputation - is it all too difficult? This article will argue that the reverse is the case - so long as companies understand that brand management and reputation management are the same thing - and so long as they have an imperative to integrate what they say with what they do - and then tell the truth. And as long as they have the confidence not to have their reputation management decisions taken by lawyers!

Let's start with the key premise that there is really no difference between a company's corporate brand and its reputation. This is not semantics - the need to understand this principle is an essential condition before we can go on to put a reputation management plan together. But first lets clarify what we mean by corporate identity or brand. In a company like Unilever the corporate brand is the company name and it is the multitude of product brands that comprise the consumer offer. Lipton and Lux and Persil stand alone as distinctive brands and although there is some measure of endorsement from the Unilever parent brand this is not crucial to the product brands' success. When Unilever experienced some problems with the reformulation of their Persil brand back in the 1990s it did little harm to their corporate brand or to their business performance. It was a costly error - but it was confined to one product line - albeit an important one.

Contrast this with the now largely forgotten furore over Formula Shell back in the 1980s. Formula Shell was launched as being the "first new petrol for fifteen years" and the advertising made extravagant performance claims. However within months of the launch it emerged that in certain vehicles and in certain circumstances the additives in Formula Shell could actually damage a car's engine. In this case there was no possibility of distancing the brand of the corporation from the product brand - they were the same. The revelation that Shell, a company previously believed to be highly technologically advanced, could make such an error damaged Shell's reputation - and not just in respect of product formulations.
In the petroleum sector most companies, and all the multinationals, manage what Wally Olins calls a "Monolithic" brand structure - essentially their corporate identity runs as an identifier through the whole of their vertically integrated business from wellhead to the petrol station. There are some exceptions to this (BP has kept the brand integrity of its Castrol lubricants subsidiary for example) but in the main the monolithic structure prevails. The implications for the company in respect of brand and reputation management are both positive and negative - and need to be understood. On the plus side is the endorsement that the corporate name can give to new products and new ventures. Shell's latest differentiated petrol product Shell V-Power is very definitely a Shell endorsed sub-brand for example - just as Formula Shell once was. On the other hand Shell's overtly corporately branded and largely unsuccessful moves into some renewable energy areas such as "Shell Forestry" and "Shell Solar" were ill advised - at least with hindsight. There was never a satisfactory corporate fit for Shell to be in these businesses and the internal will to make them work never existed. These failures damaged Shell's overall reputation and credibility - something that might not have happened had a less Shell-branded option been pursued. The other real risk for monolithically branded corporations is of course the collateral damage that can be done when one part of the business fails or under-performs - or is perceived to have done so. In Ireland Shell's difficulties with its large Exploration and Production project Corrib in County Mayo led to protests from the local community and from environmental activists - including on the wholly separately managed and unconnected Shell-branded petrol station business. This brings us to BP's brand challenge in the light of the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster.


The Deepwater Horizon tragedy, in which a dozen workers lost their lives and which is causing major environmental damage, will no doubt become a reputation management case study in years to come. If ever there was a case of the need to manage perceptions this is one. The facts of the case will no doubt eventually emerge after the investigative enquiries are completed. But few would disagree that the public perception is one of corporate failure both in respect of the fact that the accident happened at all and in respect of the unedifying initial blame shifting between the various parties involved: BP - the commissioner of the rig, Transocean, its owner and operator and Halliburton who provided, on a sub-contracting basis, some of the rig-based services. It is also necessary in this case, as in so many others, to point the finger at the legal elephant traps that lie in the way of open and truthful disclosure. If BP had acknowledged right from the start what most observers, including the US President, believed - that they, BP, were ultimately responsible for the disaster and its consequences - then the legal penalties could have been punitive. They may still be of course but there is little doubt that as in so many of such cases in modern times the dead hand of the lawyers can be seen to have played a disproportionately strong part. To BP’s credit, current communications at the time of writing this article regarding Deepwater Horizon seem straightforward and truthful.

After Shell's scandalous failure to disclose the truth about their hydrocarbon reserves back in 2004 there is no doubt that virtually no moves are made, and certainly no significant public statements are issued, by the company without the lawyers being central to the process. If you look at Shell's most recent Annual Reports, for example, you will see a document full to the brim with obfuscating legalese - the contrast with the far more open and self-confident Reports of ten or fifteen years ago is marked.

So for a monolithic brand like Shell or BP there is no escaping the fact that problems in one part of the business can damage brand approval in other substantially unconnected parts of the company. Look, for example, at this report from the Daily Mail last year when BP's profits fell. The illustration is of a customer in a petrol station - but in truth BP's retail business had virtually no impact on the profit fall. The problem is that Roadside Retail, for the oil companies with downstream businesses like Shell or BP, is the most visible manifestation of their monolithic corporate brand. And the media will always illustrate stories about almost anything to do with the company with images from a branded petrol station.

In Roadside Retail it is not just the monolithic oil majors who operate in a brand environment in which their Corporate Identity is synonymous with their retailing brand. The same applies to the ever more important hypermarket and supermarket operators - but in these cases the coalescence of brand and reputation is nearly always a benefit. Although on the face of it for Tesco to run a network of petrol stations, previously the preserve of the oil companies, may have initially seemed curious in fact there was an inescapable and consumer-driven logic to the move. The Tesco corporate brand conferred a high degree of respectability - their reputation as a professional company was high. And their retail brand (synonymous, of course, with the corporate brand) was almost unchallenged in their sector. So for Tesco to offer fuels and lubricants on forecourts was credible not because they were an oil company but because they were a multiproduct retailer. Of course they had to understand the special mechanics of running petrol stations - but that was not a problem. And the corporate brand conferred reasons to believe and reasons to prefer from the start.

One of the reasons that reputation management has proved difficult for so many huge corporations is that it is all too often seen as being the same thing as lobbying and PR - especially in the United States. PR is often perceived as being at best just providing a positive gloss on reality, whilst ignoring harder truths, whilst at worst it can be characterised as systematic lying. I would argue that in the same way consumers see through false brand promises stakeholders soon see through mendacious PR and misguided attempts to built reputations through selective and slanted corporate advertising. To build a positive reputation companies must above all do the right things in the right way. Where health and safety is concerned there is no alternative but always to go the extra mile and if a project becomes marginal as a result they must have the courage to walk away. If good behaviour on HSE (etc.) is inculcated into corporate behaviour throughout the company then risks will be reduced substantially. And if the operational risks are reduced then potential damage to corporate reputation is reduced as well. Finally it is essential that reputation management plans, especially when it comes to corporate communications and other stakeholder engagement, tell the truth. The challenge is not to present the company in a positive light and to ignore the negatives. It is to present the company in a positive light because there is a positive story to tell - that it's not just PR hype but that you really can say that everywhere it operates the company "walks the talk".



Paddy Briggs

May 2010

© Minale Tattersfield