I Wrote This – Fortunately, Great Clients and Designers Were Involved.

In 2010, I participated in the BP wellness calendar and it came out very well – you can read about that excellent project here.

Now the 2011 Calendar is in play, titled “I Can.” It is described in the most recent post on the Prism Design blog.

Whole different year now. But same great team of people, same fine clients. Thank you very much, everyone, for the chance to be involved again.

Oil closed over $91/bbl today? Bring on 2011!

Oil is such a volatile issue in America and the world. Oil and gas markets are complex, sources are controversial and opinions of how we produce natural gas or petroleum products are never ever moderate.

By mid-summer (June 29), CommodityOnline.com reported: According to Market Strategies’ E2 (Energy + Environment) Index, which measures consumer perceptions of the energy industry’s economic contribution to the US economy, environmental performance and credibility on environmental issues, the oil industry’s image has plummeted from a score of 40 in December 2009 to 30 in June 2010 – a 25 percent decline in six months.

The energy industry itself can be…deprecatory. Remember the ’84-’85 bumper sticker? “Lord, send us another oil boom – we promise not to screw it up next time.”

I have created marketing and advertising programs for the energy industry for quite a while now. I’ve branded in it, direct-mailed about it and built websites for its participating companies and corporations. Why, I’ve even written blog posts about it, like the crisis communications piece here. So I know that the need to market in the energy industry today has never been stronger...even during challenging times.

The amount of information about new opportunities, products and services in “energy” continues to grow overwhelmingly – that calls for marketing programs to focus attention efficiently, to find qualified prospects and long-term customers for everything from seismic interpretation software to the lubes for drill collars and tool joints operating under extreme conditions.

Marketing to the ‘patch means creating compelling arguments in favor of new technologies, or innovative ways to improve old ones, in old fields and new fields, from the wellhead to the refinery and way beyond. It means advocating for drilling permits when the Feds have a serious case of the slows, just like ATP Oil & Gas is doing now.

The energy industry powers the creation of American jobs, upstream and downstream. Whether it’s in recruitment or safety training or healthcare benefits, every one of these people demands and deserves effective communications, with social media leading the list of new-tech methods.

Here at year-end, Signalwriter is cheerleading. Thanks to my energy industry clients for the work this past year. Today oil closed at $91+ a barrel. I’m looking forward to what’s coming next.

PS: If you feel like you need a new bumper sticker, let me know and I’ll see what I can do...RLB.

Every Day in Every Way, Wellness Marketing Gets Better and Better.

Boy, have we come a long way since Wellbee was the spokesinsect for the Centers for Disease Control – in practice if not in theory. The wellness concept has been around a long time. (The CDC poster dates to 1964.)

Selling people on wellness, though, has always been more challenging. That’s been particularly true of not just one but two company stakeholder groups: employees and executives.

Today, sayeth the Wellness Councils of America, more than 80% of America’s businesses with 50 or more employees have some kind of health promotion program, like exercise, stop-smoking classes or stress management. A lot of employers offer wellness programs because they have finally discovered that the benefit is worth the cost. But business leaders continue to wonder: how can they get more employees committed and involved?

When you practice the highly focused form of “internal wellness marketing,” you know that only worksite health promotion stands out as the long-term answer for keeping employees well in the first place. That’s an insight that you have shared with your management, and transmitted to everyone inside your company via employee communications programs like the one I blogged about here.

It’s an insight that drives five outstanding presenters at the next AMAHouston Healthcare SIG seminar, “Marketing Wellness Inside.” You should be there on Friday, June 25.

See, hear and learn about new and effective practices for internal wellness marketing from Mark Poindexter who manages wellness programs in the US for Shell Oil; Health and Wellness Director Andrew Lowe of the Frost Insurance Agency; Michele Nelson-Housley, the program coordinator for employee health and well-being at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center; and Human Resources Generalist Shellie Perez from Mustang Engineering.

The event moderator is Jonathan Lack, who brings his own set of employee-marketing experiences to the show as Executive Director of the Houston Wellness Association.

A bit of imagination will tell you that classic marketing, applied with creativity and power, can work just as well on the inside as it does on the outside. Research will show you the reasons why wellness needs to be marketed as effectively as possible, from the aging of the American workforce to our cultural search for the Fountain of Youth. (I’m hoping for a great tan post mortem, myself.)

And perhaps most important is that this Healthcare SIG seminar will prove to you, once again, that marketing is a profession that encompasses all kinds of industries and markets.

Forty-five years ago, Wellbee promoted everything from washing your hands – sound familiar? – to booster shots…even “oral polio vaccine” if you remember what that was. Register today. So next week you can discover how we’re marketing wellness better than ever. And why it’s so necessary.

When It’s All Blown Up – Beyond Crisis Communications.

The “disaster in the Gulf” has generated far more than sad deaths and leaking hydrocarbons – as if these are not enough. There was big-time yelling (did you see James Carville on TV yesterday?). Plenty of finger-pointing and blame-passing. Tremendous political pressure. And also, engineering challenges and potential triumphs when the leaks are stopped and the clean-up has been accomplished.

Looking back to the quiet times BL (Before Leak), you may find reading “Schumpeter” instructive. BL in this case is April 8, 2010, a couple of weeks before Deepwater Horizon blew up. The Schumpeter to whom I’m referring is the nom-de-plume of the regular Business editorializer for The Economist.

This Schumpeter wrote here about “Brand rehab.” He outlined two rules for successful crisis management:

First, the boss needs to take charge. This means sidelining corporate cluck-cluckers such as lawyers (who worry that any admission of guilt will lead to lawsuits) or financial officers (who obsess about the bottom line). It also means putting the survival of the company above personal considerations. Many of the most damaging crises, by contrast, have resulted from foot-dragging at the top.

The second rule is that crisis-racked firms should redouble their focus on their customers.

Now we’ve gone beyond the normal activities of crisis management, or crisis communications. In the case of the leaking well, all the stakeholders, from the crew and families of the sunken rig to the people who live and work along the shores of the eastern Gulf of Mexico, to company shareholders, to politicians, have been seriously affected.

It’s not like the Tiger Woods version of the problem which The Economist article actually addresses. It is much more serious for everyone, including BP and Halliburton (which are clients) and Transocean (which is not).

No company operating in the Western business world today will ever be free of intense scrutiny. And so much has been written, broadcast and screamed about what ought to be done, should have been done – including nationalization of the offshore wells and lynching oil company executives – well, Signalwriter isn’t going to add to the load.

Except to ask you to take the long view. (Hard but not impossible.) The real Schumpeter – Joseph Schumpeter, 1883-1950 – wrote:

Every piece of business strategy acquires its true significance only against the background of that process [of Creative Destruction] and within the situation created by it.

The creative destruction of this offshore drilling event is going to massively affect business and regulatory strategies. The event’s going to change companies and regulators too. Will the effects and the changes be revolutionary…or evolutionary? I don’t have the answer; I look forward to taking part in the dialogue.

PS: I certainly expect some readers will take me to the woodshed because I’m wiritng about branding and marketing in the same post as the tragic events which began with the April 20 explosion and fire that sank the Deepwater Horizon rig. So, dear readers: “There’s lots of copy on these subjects – Google it for yourselves.”

Copywriting for Wellness: Turning Whimsical Makes a Winner for BP.

Few marketing copywriters ever get to write a line like “Listen to your inner asparagus.” Even fewer see the line in print. But I’m the lucky one thanks to an outstanding wellness marketing program at BP.

Among other projects, I was tasked to write the 2010 BP Wellness Calendar, in support of this year’s “Becoming a healthier you” employee benefits campaign.

The campaign itself is spearheaded by Janelle Ewing, who is Manager of Benefits Communication at BP America; and seconded by Bonnie Hargett, BP Benefits Communication Consultant. It’s been supported on the graphic design side by Prism Design – the Prismatics created the look for the internal campaign that includes this terrific 13-month calendar.

I created a “voice” for the calendar that went outside the lines a little – taking the month-after-month appeals from the pretty ordinary self-health advice column to the somewhat provocative, maybe-even-laugh-out-loud category. So, March, for example, starts off with “Get around to eating smarter” and continues:

Come on, you’re smarter than that pizza. Start cutting the intake of “stupid” foods while you build up your intake of smart foods like fruits and vegetables. Fact: Most women who eat five or more servings of fruits and vegetables a day can cut their risk of developing cancer by up to 50% compared to those who only eat two or three servings a day. Fact: Men can use at least nine servings to reduce their risk of cancer, heart disease and other illnesses.

We backed up month-fulls of wellness tricks and tips with our sources for that data. We included appeals to participate in health advisory programs and earn reward points every month from the beginning of 2010 through the first month of next year. The calendar became a thorough compendium of wellness support, from the health benefits of working out to stress relief to back-to-school immunizations (“Invaders from inner space,” another great line.)

Look, wellness is a product: A proactive and preventive approach designed to provide optimum levels of health, emotional and social functioning. But selling wellness has been overlooked by common marketers. The “approved” definition of marketing itself leaves out a major group of stakeholders that’s hugely influential on each major corporation – the company’s employees.

In terms of their effect on revenue, profitability and long-term customer relationships, it has been proven that the improved physical and mental health of employees has substantial positive impact on both the cost of healthcare provided by the employer and the cost of doing business generally.

The BP benefits team fulfilled this marketing-inside function, along with the insight that a successful Employee Wellness Program has to be broad enough to meet the needs of all employees, regardless of their current level of health.

Ewing’s and Hargett’s more-than-ordinary communication effort has been crucial to getting employees to participate in greater numbers in the BP wellness program. The calendar is one component of a tight mixture of communications pieces and appeals – an internal marketing program which has been successful in generating high numbers of sign-ups.

Pretty cool that I got to participate in this, along with Prism designers Terry Teutsch and Stacy Allen. Thank you, BP, for the opportunity to deliver great work – with whimsy added.