Brand or company logos are highly precious things. Small armies of designers, brand managers and trademark lawyers spend their waking hours and huge amounts of money, creating, nuturing and protecting them. When they get it right, this core element of a brand’s intangible value can be worth hundreds of millions of pounds, which is why Greenpeace’s currently strategy of encouraging consumers to subvert the BP logo is a masterstroke. The pressure group has created a microsite www.greenpeace.org.uk/behindthelogoas a platform for professional and amateur designers to express their anger about the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico and create their own versions of the BP helios logo.
This tactic has particular resonance because the ‘Beyond Petroleum’ tagline – the idea that this is a business committed to non-traditional energy sources - looks even less credible in the wake of the current environmental disaster. Greenpeace will now be hoping that the BP lawyers adopt the approach taken by their counterparts at Nestle, who thought it would be a good idea to block similarly customised versions of the Kit-Kat logo, on the grounds of trademark infringement.
All this succeeded in doing was to transform a relatively minor web phenomenon into a global media controversy. It will be interesting to see whether the lawyers at BP take the bait.
