New lessons in how to destroy corporate reputations

Delegates at a conference last Friday on combating corporate PR disasters were asked whether anyone was boycotting BP. Several hands were raised.

The only reason more hands weren’t, the questioner observed, was that the oil spill was in the Gulf of Mexico and not near Great Barrier Island – in which case all hands might have gone up.

The exercise showed that even people who earn their living from helping companies who stuff up will do what most others do: avoid a company’s products as the main means of showing their disapproval of something.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill has become one of the world’s great environmental disasters.

At the weekend, BP glumly announced its “top kill” strategem hadn’t worked. This was the attempt to stem the oil flow from a blowout 1500m under the sea by pumping heavy drilling liquids into the well.

The Wall Street Journal reports that, instead:

The company now plans to try to contain the flow of oil from the leak with a "lower marine riser package," or cap. The operation would involve removing a broken drilling pipe, or riser, that lies atop the blowout preventer and capping the valve with a siphon that would take the oil to the surface. [BP managing director Bob] Dudley said "there is no certainty" that the operation – which BP officials say has never been carried out in 5000ft of water – would work.

While BP is taking the heat, the political fallout for President Barack Obama is rising inexorably as well. A commentary elsewhere in the Journal, by its best-read columnist Peggy Noonan, is damning:

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They're in one reality, he's in another.

This judgment is gaining currency in the international press, too. The Daily Telegraph’s Washington DC correspondent says the President has fallen “woefully short” in his handling of the catastrophe. The writer quotes President Obama's description of President Bush’s “unconscionable incompetence” over Hurricane Katrina – words that no doubt will come back to haunt the president – before saying:

His approach to the issue was that of the law student suddenly fascinated by a science project. He displayed none of the visceral indignation Americans feel about pretty much everything these days – two-thirds now say they are "angry" about the way things are going – resorting instead to Spock-like technocratic language and legalese. "I'm not contradicting my prior point," he stated at one juncture. During those 63 minutes of soporific verbosity, about 800 barrels of oil poured into the Gulf.

Fishy business

Closer to home, corporate reputations are also under regular attack – though not on the BP scale. One example concerns the Danish-owned Maersk shipping line and exports of New Zealand fish.

It started when Greenpeace, which makes a living out of attacking corporate reputations, claimed that Maersk, the world’s largest shipping line, was refusing to carry some at-risk marine species worldwide, including orange roughy caught in New Zealand waters.

"We recognise the global concerns over the overfishing of toothfish species and support efforts to curb this trade," Maersk Line head of global seafood David Pawlan was quoted as saying in the release. "The checks and processes that we have implemented with our global offices help prevent the transportation of these species as well as illegal, unreported, and unregulated [IUU] catches of other species."

The claims were sourced in this briefing note on Maesrk’s website, which was a follow up to an earlier one preceding the European Seafood Exposition in April:

… we look forward to telling you about what we’re doing to secure the industry’s future – from making sure the seafood we ship has been legally caught, to working on issues such as endangered species, overfishing and protective regulations.

Neither statement quotes Mr Pawlan and the former makes no mention of New Zealand.

This so-called “announcement” was immediately repeated by the Greens in this statement, which came from Parliament. Both statements immediately generated widespread media coverage last Friday.

These then became the source for some comments on a Greenpeace USA blog that congratulates the company on its “heartening” policy of “refusing to ship any illegally caught Antarctic or Patagonian toothfish due to environmental concerns.”

David Pawlan, Maersk’s Line Head of Global Seafood, makes no equivocation about the reasons behind this progressive policy shift. “We recognize the global concerns over the overfishing of toothfish species,” says Pawlan, “and support efforts to curb this trade.”

The blog goes on to quote Maersk’s statement that it had also pledged "that it will not carry any shark products, any whale meat or whale blubber, or any orange roughy, a fish notorious for its exemplification of unsustainability." But the link supporting the company’s statement is to those put out by Greenpeace and the Green Party.

These stories go round and round, with fishing industry websites picking up the heavily-Greenpeace/Greens biased stories, which in turn become sources for further reports, such as this from SeaSource.com, which aggregates news stories.

Another example, also with Greenpeace/Greens statements getting the main angle, is on FIS.com, which says it is a “world leader in seafood information and services.” At the end of the story it helpfully adds some background:

Maersk touted its new sustainable seafood policy at the European Seafood Exposition in Brussels in late April, explaining that shipping by water is more eco-efficient way to deliver seafood over long distances. Transporting salmon from Norway to Korea in a Maersk reefer container emits 25 times less carbon monoxide than moving it by air, said the Danish company.

In a more recent story, FIS quotes Sanford, the Auckland fishing company, as describing some of Maersk’s statements as “bizarre” on grounds that it “remains unclear how the latter will decide which seafood shipments comprise IUU fishing products and which do not.”

So you can see how Greenpeace and the Greens have distorted a company spokesman’s comments, linked it to New Zealand exports, and lo – even the industry itself is fooled.

When the media ran the inaccurate initial claims, the Seafood Industry Council issued a brief statement from its chief executive Owen Symmans, saying the company “had turned its back on the industry.”

A day later, Maersk had clarified its position, with the media saying it

has backed down over refusing to transport orange roughy from New Zealand, a day after saying it would not ship the fish for sustainability reasons. The Denmark-based company's New Zealand manager, Julian Bevis, said on Thursday the company would no longer knowingly take orders of the fish – a decision in line with its sustainability policy.

However, the company issued a statement yesterday [Friday] saying it was still accepting all seafood shipments from New Zealand, although it was reviewing its policy over future shipments. Mr Bevis did not return calls from The Dominion Post, but Maersk said the company was still taking orders for fish that had been legally caught while it carried out the review.

Meanwhile, the Seafood Council issued its revised version of events, essentially saying nothing had changed.

Background: It is worth reading this official NZ Ministries of Fishing statement (March) on release of sustainable quotas and this Seafood Source.com commentary from last September recognising the strengths of the New Zealand quota system, which is under sustained reputational attack from Greepeace and the Greens, aided and abetted by the media.

Orange roughy: New Zealand's total allowable commercial catch for orange roughy was set at 11,062 tonnes for the 2009/10 fishing year and exports last year were worth $US51 million; hoki earns that much more again.

Footnote: This is not the first time the media, using dubious sources from environmental groups, have attempted to undermine the New Zealand fishing industry and the sustainable quota system – check out this brief account on SeaSource.com of the New York Times' admission of fault over a story on hoki.