Crisis communication failures: The BP Case Study

On the 20th of April 2010, an outstanding explosion of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig situated in the Golf of Mexico caused the largest maritime disaster oil spill in the USA history and particularly caused considerable reputation and financial losses to BP.To deal with the spill oil as well as reputation and financial losses, the company particularly use many tactics and tools to communicate with stakeholders during and after the crisis. However, crisis management and communication experts’ opinions differed on whether BP crisis communication was effective or ineffective.This paper aims to assess BP crisis communication and mainly to point out possible failures through a content analysis of secondary data collected from various sources (newspapers, magazines, annual reports and blogs).