As happens occasionally, the US oil and gas industry finds itself trapped in the dangerous intersection of High Oil and Gas Prices and Stellar Profits. If there were a market for such things, public venom directed at oil and gas companies would sell for many times the price of crude and suffer no shortage of buyers.
Untypical profits born of extreme market conditions have provoked outrage. It doesn’t matter that the outraged, through profligate energy consumption, share blame for the market’s tightness. It doesn’t matter that unprecedented damage to producing and processing infrastructure from two mammoth hurricanes offers ample reason for fuel prices to be high. It doesn’t matter that prices already have begun to subside and will take future profits with them. The outrage is real. And it is reviving calls for past mistakes of energy policy from politicians eager to exploit the furor.
Rejecting facts
In a rational world, this could not happen. Facts would explain the prices and profits, and the explanation would soothe all but the chronic cranks. But it’s not a rational world, especially in the US on the subject of oil and gas. In the US, outside the minority of the population professionally affiliated with fluid hydrocarbons, people don’t want facts. They want to be angry at oil and gas companies. So facts, because of their potential to divert Americans from what they want, face rejection on sight and seldom shape popular opinion.
Issues campaigns by the industry nevertheless concentrate on facts and reasoned argument. Important as those things are, they’re never enough. The governing fact is that Americans in general profoundly dislike oil and gas companies and their activities. So they logically oppose initiatives they see as favoring the objects of their enmity, whether it’s leasing of federal land or opting for something other than the strictest possible fuel specification. Worse, Americans have trouble conceiving of any alignment of the oil and gas industry’s interests with their own. The industry’s perennial response to this dreadful state of affairs: “Educate the public.” It seldom works. The public has no appetite for the education.
The industry needs a new approach. It needs to quit assuming that antipathy and ignorance are unshakeable characteristics of the audiences with which it must communicate and to start doing something to change them.
First, though, it must know where the negative attitudes directed at it originate. And that requires excursions into realms with which oil industry professionals have little comfort, such as deeply embedded feelings and subconscious thought. These squishy qualities of human life influence behavior to a greater extent than most level-headed managers want to admit.
In his book How Customers Think, Harvard University marketing professor Gerald Zaltman points to research indicating that 95% of all human cognition occurs below awareness-in the subconscious. “The unconscious gives the orders,” Zaltman writes, “and the conscious mind carries them out.” And for diehard practitioners of the failed rationalist approach to public and political affairs, the news gets even worse. Zaltman points out that human emotions and reasoning are interwoven. “Although our brains have separate structures for processing emotions and logical reasoning, the two systems communicate with each other and jointly affect our behavior,” he writes. “Even more important, the emotional system-the older of the two in terms of evolution-typically exerts the first force on our thinking and behavior. More important still, emotions contribute to, and are essential for, sound decision-making.”
Changing disfavor
From this it should be clear that an industry viscerally disliked by the public can’t expect to reason its way to sound treatment from legislators and policy-makers-or, for that matter, to successful recruitment of new employees. The industry has to get to the bottom of the disfavor and change it. And that requires assessment of psychosocial phenomena impenetrable by common opinion surveys and focus groups. Techniques for making that type of assessment exist. The industry should study and employ them.
The oil and gas industry will never be universally liked, which isn’t in any case a sound business priority in most industries. For the lift it would give the industry in politics, recruitment, and other areas where it struggles now, just becoming less disliked would be triumph enough.✦
