EXXON on Branding Greed

Published 20080201 by Olivier Blanchard | E-mail this post

From SEENcreative, this pretty much sums it up the most disgusting corporate news of the year (and it's only Feb 2):

Exxon Mobile has just reported the largest annual profit in the history of U.S. corporations: $40.7 billion.

This profit came from an annual revenue of $404.5 billion.

That's $404,500,000,000.00.

That's $1,300 per second.

Thats an additional $125 million per quarter for every $1 increase in oil prices.

Think about that next time you fill up your tank. Oh, and since business is obviously so tough for these guys, they continue to receive billions of dollars in tax breaks ($2.6 to $9 billion in '06, depending on who you ask).

And this whole time, I thought high gas prices were due to the fact that oil was so hard to find, so tough to drill and so precarious to transport, what with the price of labor going up and the Sub-Prime thing and global terrorism and all...

This is obscene.

When your brand becomes synonymous with Greed with a capital "G", the kind of greed that weakens economies, kills businesses and robs consumers of their buying power by driving up the cost of goods (and thus the price of goods), it's difficult to effectively sell yourself as anything but a giant pile of self-serving mierda.

The issue isn't that Exxon's profits are through the roof. Good for them. Seriously. Profits are good. No, the issue here is about context.

Way to position yourself as the most despised brand of all time, Exxon... second perhaps only to Halliburton... but then again, maybe not. (Lest we forget...)

If only you still had Lee Raymond at the helm, there would be no contest.

For shame.