Response to article on Brand Channel. See:
http://www.brandchannel.com:80/start1.asp?fa_id=388
The substantive point about gasoline brands is that marketing is only an incidental activity for oil companies – nearly all of their efforts are on the “upstream” (the search for and exploitation of oil and gas reserves). As a 37 years service Shell veteran, now retired and active as a brand consultant, I can assure you that the chapter on marketing in the average oil executive’s memoirs would be one blank page. This is not to say that there aren’t competent marketers in the oil companies – just that they linger low in the hierarchies and that they have no prospects of reaching the top if marketing is “all” they can do. When the boards of Shell or BP or ExxonMobil and the rest meet the agenda items are rarely if ever about customers, brands, channels of distribution, market share, communications and the other imperatives that drive the business in proper branded marketing companies. The discussions are about exploration, production, refining and all the other key business activities – the so-called “upstream”.
The irony of the almost complete ignorance of oil company top executives about branded marketing is that these companies are amongst the world’s biggest branded retailers. Shell ahs more than 40,000 Shell braded gas stations in over 100 countries, but in a recent extensive interview for the London Guardian newspaper Shell CEO Jeroen van der Veer didn’t even mention Shell’s marketing business once - see: http://tinyurl.com/ytxhjf . Everything in an oil major is top down and that top is so far removed from its consumer customers (motorists for example) that they probably wouldn’t recognise one if they saw one. This leads to minuscule and wholly inadequate amounts of money being allocated to advertising and other brand promotion initiatives. The culture of the men at the top is essentially a cost minimisation culture. When you drill for oil you can secure a completive advantage by doing it more efficiently (cheaply) than your competitors. As any marketer knows this is a mindset which leads for disaster in marketing. It is 35 years since the late Stephen King’s seminal “What is a brand” (recently reprinted by JWT here in the UK and circulated with Campaign magazine) which showed (even proved) that brands which invest consistently over time prosper and those that do not fail. That is a lesson that the oil industry has forgotten.
I believe that the only way that oil companies can properly exploit their brand potential is to separate completely their “upstream” from their marketing business. And I mean completely – not just some fudged separation within the same corporate structure. Only when the main preoccupation of the top management of Shell or BP is with the brand and with the customer will we start to see proper and focused branded marketing in this important sector. Please see my article in “Market Leader” magazine for the development of this argument: http://tinyurl.com/3dau4e .
