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This essay will consider the theoretical and sociopolitical implications of British
Petroleum’s use of the rhetoric of environmentalism in the context of their integrated
branding campaign.
By the late 1960s, the anxiety felt by graphic designers over the validity of their
work had taken an existential focus, as the growth of consumerism, the Vietnam War,
and challenges to the state by social movements acting for peace, civil rights, and
feminism signaled a more general crisis for individuals in American society (Hardt,
1993).
In that early global moment, media played a central role in reproducing the social
context and the individual’s sense of place in it. To characterize the role of media in
globalization since then, Appadurai (1996) offers the concept of “mediascapes” as one of
the key dimensions within which we can know each other culturally. He defines them as:
image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, …[that] offer to
those who experience and transform them…a series of elements (such as
characters, plots, and textual forms) out of which can be formed imagined lives,
their own as well as those of others living in other places. (pp. 35-36, emphasis
added)
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In this case, those experiencing and transforming these messages into global brands are
graphic designers. And it is their ability to imagine new stories and to build new
corporate brand identities upon them—as well as to reflexively challenge that process—
which presents the point of this inquiry.
In characterizing globalization, the break between modernity and globalization is
not discrete (Appadurai, 1996). Instead, as is discussed (below), the contrast between the
BP branding campaign’s global reach through the production of the mediascape and the
Convention