Our relationship with BP extends to brand rollout across many disciplines and continents over decades

BP

Working across BP’s brand rollout, communications and international events

Introduction

IDEAS has worked extensively with the company, creating everything from branded merchandise and community communications to major international events and digital knowledge systems.

It is a good example of the way we work when a brief refuses to stay neatly inside one discipline.

The Challenge

A company operating at BP’s scale has an enormous amount to communicate.

People need to understand what the organisation stands for, participate in its programmes, recognise its initiatives and, importantly, feel connected to something much larger than their own part of the business.

That means communications have to work at every level — from a map on a wall to an item someone takes home, from a community publication to a global knowledge-sharing system.

The challenge was not simply to make these things look like BP.

It was to make them work.

Our Intervention

Over an extensive period of collaboration, IDEAS became a creative resource for BP across a remarkable range of requirements.

We created branded assets, merchandise and promotional items, magazines and community communications, together with substantial pieces of information design — including large-format mapping for the Forties pipeline.

But the relationship moved well beyond conventional marketing materials.

One of the most ambitious projects was the creation and innovation of the Operations Excellence Knowledge Garden — an online system designed to capture, organise and share operational knowledge across the business.

Following its UK soft launch in St Andrews, IDEAS became lead creatives for the worldwide launch in San Diego.

This was no simple conference.

We helped shape the brand rollout experience from end to end: brochures, welcome packs, signage, set dressing, communications, presentations, delegate materials and spouse entertainment — all contributing to a single, coherent expression of the programme.

The physical environment and the emerging digital system had to tell the same story.

Operations Excellence Worldwide

The Challenge

BP has approximately 30,000 people working in the operations area across all of the streams.  Many of their activities and processes are similar but they rarely collaborate.

The production throughput lost due to inefficiencies in the system are huge and a potential prize of $2 billion was sought over the next five years to be delivered through the Business units and enabled by the community.

Research uncovered the real problem: people in a vast organisation held valuable knowledge and were reluctant to share it.

No amount of communication would fix that on its own. It needed a change in behaviour.

Stelios:

The answer was to turn the problem upside down. Where people were previously relectant to give knowledge away, we would make sharing it an honour, one worth celebrating.

Stelios, a play on steal and BP’s own Helios logo, was an award for the best colleague knowledge or ‘idea steal’. The award itself looked like a smash-and-grab display case, with the prize already gone.

It changed the ethos: sharing stopped being a loss and became a badge of pride. [Add one line on how people responded.]Stelios

BP’s award scheme for operational excellence had a name that was an inside joke, and an award that was the punchline.

The name was the client’s own play on words: Stelios – borrowing good ideas from colleagues. So we designed the award to look like a smash-and-grab: a display case with the prize already gone.

A trophy people smile at gets displayed, photographed and talked about. That’s the principle behind much of our work with large organisations: the brand is not the logo. The brand is the experience people have around it.

Brand Rollout – What We Delivered

• Corporate Brand Rollout and branded environments
• Merchandise and promotional products
• Magazines and internal communications
• Community communications
• Large-format information graphics and mapping, including the Forties pipeline
• Operations Excellence Knowledge Garden creative graphics and development
• Creative Input to the Digital knowledge-system innovation team
• International launch strategy and creative direction
• San Diego worldwide launch environment
• Brochures and welcome packs
• Signage and environmental graphics
• Set dressing and event production
• Delegate and participant materials
• Spouse and accompanying-guest experiences
• Stelios award identity and branded assets
• Creative direction and production management

Results & Legacy

In 2005, the first year of opperation, BP’s Operations Community co-ordinator Johnnhy Martin confimed that BP Opperations Excellence, knowledge sharing scheme had saved the company the equivalent cost of one oil rig.

The Knowledge Garden was particularly significant because it anticipated a problem that many large organisations would subsequently face: how do you capture valuable knowledge, make it accessible and encourage people across a global organisation to share it?

IDEAS helped turn what could have been an abstract corporate initiative into something tangible, navigable and engaging.

As creatives, we helped the team mastermind the worldwide launch — creating the environment, communications and experience around the system rather than simply designing a collection of supporting materials.

More than just a brand rollout, the sheer range of work tells its own story.

IDEAS was trusted not simply to produce communications for BP, but to move between corporate communications, information design, digital innovation, events, environments, merchandise and experience — often within the same project.

The Operations Excellence Knowledge Garden remains the standout example.

At a time when online knowledge-sharing systems were still relatively immature, BP was exploring how technology could connect expertise across a global organisation. IDEAS helped make that proposition understandable, engaging and memorable — then helped launch it to an international audience.

The work also demonstrates something fundamental about creative consultancy.

The most valuable contribution is not always the thing that gets photographed.

Sometimes it is the thinking behind it.
Sometimes it is the idea that makes a complex proposition accessible.
Sometimes it is the hundreds of apparently small decisions that make a major experience feel coherent.

With BP, IDEAS was trusted with all of them.

The Knowledge Garden

“Don took what felt like an outlandish idea and turned it into something real — and successful.

He was ahead of the curve, working with emerging technology in ways others simply weren’t. While most developers were still catching up, Don was already thinking about what came next. We were early in building a basic social platform; he added the thinking and refinement that made it truly work. From that point on, it took off and continued running successfully for over 20 years.

Johnny Martin
Operations Excellence Advisor.
Coordinating and incorporating best practices across the BP operations organisation globally.