Earlier this month, BP gave a great deal of free publicity to one of its many suppliers. Across the media spectrum, we heard and read all about the previously unsung Transocean, as Tony Haywood, BP's chief executive, showcased its role in recent BP endeavours.
This is unusual, but then, it is also unusual to have the boot of the White House administration on your throat. At the time, BP was being pressed hard to accept responsibility for the Gulf of Mexico oil-rig disaster and, while acknowledging that it would clean up the mess, was merely pointing out that the real responsibility lay several steps back in the supply chain.
Some perspective here, before we look at the implications from a branding point of view. Eleven people died, the environment is compromised, financial costs are huge. These are the immediate issues, and damage to the BP brand is very much a secondary concern. Nevertheless, in the longer term, a tarnished, once-great, global brand could be the enduring legacy. Why, if it was a supplier problem?
In the perceptual world of brands, there is no such thing as a supply chain. Or rather, no such thing as a thought chain or emotion chain that seeks to make sense of a supply chain. Brands are simplifiers. That's what they are for: to bag up a mish-mash of competencies and associations, condense, make sense of and crystallise them in something so potent and refined that it can be abstracted as nothing more solid than a name and a symbol.
Who actually makes YSL's signature Touche eclat concealer? Who mans the desks in bright orange uniforms when you check in with easyJet? Who really takes the calls for ITV's X Factor? Who cares? The commercial arrangements whereby all these functions are outsourced is the messy stuff that consumers don't have time to think about. These are dull steps in the production process. What the consumer buys is a brand.
From the brand-owner's point of view, the attractions of this arrangement are clear: all the good deeds that suppliers do, all the clever things they create and all the burdensome tasks that they dutifully perform bring extraordinary value to the brand that commands them.
That is, until something goes wrong. When a supplier messes up, the blame and venom are directed at the brand. Simplification works both ways. Supplier incompetence is marketing's fastest way to brand destruction - a real Achilles heel now that brand owners outsource so much of what they previously did themselves.
Supply-chain decisions are a complex dance of cost and operational factors. Marketers cannot realistically expect to exert control, but neither are they powerless. When was the last time you talked to procurement about your brand positioning and the impact that suppliers might have on it? Could you extend your internal brand engagement programme to key suppliers?
A vital step is to audit suppliers that have some kind of intimate relationship with your customers - delivery companies, for example, that might put your product into their hands. Do they feel right for your brand? If not, lobby to change and make the case for increased cost if necessary.
You might still get unlucky and suffer a supplier mess-up. If it happens, remember that damage-limitation is best served by swift acceptance of responsibility at a brand or corporate level. As Haywood should have known, you can't outsource blame.
Helen Edwards has a PhD in marketing, an MBA from London Business School and is a partner at Passionbrand, where she works with some of the world's biggest advertisers
30 SECONDS ON ... Big brand supply-chain problems
- In July 2009 Wal-Mart won a case in the US courts that had been brought against it by employees of supplier companies in Nicaragua, China, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Swaziland over poor working conditions. While the judge ruled in Wal-Mart's favour, the media consensus was that it had lost in the court of public opinion.
- KFC ran into trouble in 2004 when animal rights organisation PETA released a shocking video of animal cruelty filmed at a US plant previously named KFC's Supplier of the Year.
- Cheap fashion is certainly popular, but Nike, Gap and Primark are among the brands and retailers to have been criticised for achieving those low price-tags at the expense of fair working conditions for producer-company employees.
- In 2007, Mattel had to recall hundreds of thousands of its Fisher-Price character toys. Made at a Chinese supplier factory, some of the toys had been found to be coated with potentially toxic lead-based paint.