Roadside Retail

The new Statoil identity is certainly ‘Pretty’ and an expression of modernity but why is it only corporate business to business users get to see it? Why is it retail customers who are by far the biggest audience have to put up with the old oil drop that says ‘We are an old fashioned, uncaring oil company’? Logic would point more to the reverse, i.e. ever more demanding retail customers are according to market research and actual trading figures choosing to place their custom with brands more aligned with their own values.

Lukoil USA

Is it sinister that Russian oil companies are expanding westwards or are they merely following the same business model as their western counterparts BP, Shell and Esso? When Minale Tattersfield redesigned the Lukoil retail identity in 1999 it was implicit that it should have international appeal, be customercentric and be able to compete with the best of the west. So too when the same agency designed retail identities for Rosneft and Gazprom Neft. If that's sinister then so too are all the multi national western oil companies. According to Minale Tattersfield's David Davis, creative director for all three programmes, 'We as consumers can vote with our feet. If we approve of what oil companies serve up both in decorative and more substantive terms, then we should give them our custom. Is that not true democracy?'