By Paul Dumouchelle, Management Consultant, ADVISA

The core responsibility of any marketer is to maintain, sustain and build the strength of their brand.  The discontinuation of a brand, then, is the ultimate failure.  We’ve seen the demise of some once-iconic brands in the recent past.

Lehman Brothers, once a major force in corporate finance, is no more.  The Pontiac brand of cars is on its way out.  Compaq computers – the pioneers of portable computing – absorbed into HP.  Airline brands seem to come and go with alarming frequency – alarming, that is, if you rely on them for safe transport.

So what will become of BP?  Retailers carrying the BP brand try to deflect the negative public sentiment toward the oil giant by saying they aren’t part of the BP corporate entity.  They also claim that BP gets only a tiny benefit from any sale of their gasoline.  I am skeptical that the buying public is going to ignore the signage of a gas station based on these arguments.

At best, the massive Deepwater Horizon spill could be seen as the necessary price to be paid for our reliance on hazardous petrochemicals to fuel our way of life.  What is especially disturbing, and may prove fatal to the BP brand, is that the drilling platform operation seemed to ignore serious safety warnings in the interest of corporate profit.

Such profit-driven shortcuts are bound to happen, too.  They might be seen as the inevitable price of the an efficient capitalist marketplace.  What is especially galling in this case, however, is that BP – and the oil industry in general – had no fallback solution to such a catastrophe once it took place.  The only good thing that can be said about all the attempts to “cap” the leak is that they made hilarious fodder for a Saturday Night Live skit.

Finally, and this may the final nail in the coffin – BP’s leadership took months to develop an effective PR strategy to minimize the impact on their brand.  Time will tell if the corrective action is too little, too late for the brand as whole.

For me, anything with the BP logo became toxic when evidence surfaced that they played fast and loose with necessary safety standards.