With BP deciding to put a halt to its marketing for the time being, while the brand looks to deal with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, crisis PR expert Jonathan Hemus looks at why the move is ‘a very sensible decision’.

“It’s one of the key things that any organisation in a crisis needs to do,” begins Hemus. “The company needs to review what marketing, what advertising, what promotional activity it has planned and it needs to check that it’s the right time to be doing that marketing activity and will they get the appropriate message through in the face of a major crisis,” he explained.

“It also needs to ensure that the activity is appropriate at the same time as a crisis. Sometimes you can have conflicting messages coming out in the marketing that actually out of public crisis management and that is obviously unhelpful. And also, some organisations take the prudent step of what may have been a promotional advert to maybe take a page in a newspaper to send a message out to stakeholders specifically about the crisis situation and what they are doing about it.

“For all the various reasons, this is a sensible move by BP at this time.”

He cites a particular advert he saw years ago in describing ‘the perils of not considering your marketing activity,’ when on 12 September 2001 an ad was run by The Times within the coverage of the terrorism attacks on America the previous day.

The advert was from an insurance company asking ‘Are you sure your business is protected if the worst happens?’

“It was within the 30 pages devoted solely to the attacks and clearly they hadn’t done that with the intention of capitalising on the awful events that had happened, but because no body had thought about it, it was just so awful and so crass. It was unintentional, but no one had thought about their advertising during the crisis and shows what can happen if people don’t think about the marketing activity is had already commissioned at the time of a crisis.”