Maybe it’s too soon, or too trivial, to talk about the brand marketing implications of The Spill. People died. Lives and livelihoods are still being destroyed. Inconceivable amounts of sea life continue to perish. A priceless swath of coastline is spoiled. So, no, there's no silver lining to this festering dark cloud.

There is, however, no shortage of lessons to be learned, and I’m predictably curious about one in particular.

Does the BP Spill prove once and for all the dangers of disingenuous branding?

Or, perhaps more importantly, will this finally teach us that the better strategy is always to just be the company you claim?

In British Petroleum we have an abject lesson in brand mendacity. Which is nothing new for the oil industry. But BP was among the first to take it to scale when, in 2000, then-CEO Lord John Brown knighted the company Beyond Petroleum with a $200 million advertising campaign and a new, greenified logo. In practice, they dabbled in renewables while investing trillions buying up competitors and lobbying against any form of fair market or environment regulations.

All of which was bad enough. But when Deepwater Horizon blew a gaping hole in the supposedly non-permeable membrane between the Gulf of Mexico and billions of long-buried dinosaurs, it wasn’t just oil that came gushing out. It was like BP’s personal Pandora’s Box had been opened. Everything you never really wanted to know about the company came spewing out. And no amount of golf balls, CEO’s, spin doctors or unemployed shrimpers in hazmat suits with paper towels are going to be able to stuff it back in now.

The truth is, BP embraced brazen and clearly dangerous growth strategies while dismissing the possibility of anything going wrong. In other words, they were practicing the form of American capitalism that has come to define our economy of late. I call it Quarterly Number Tunnel Vision and it totally sucks because, as a point in history, this should be the ideal time to be innovating ourselves towards a better future. Putting our resources and ingenuity towards long-term, sustainably viable solutions. Instead the game board of the American economy has been tilted towards the financial sector. So everything flows into the bloated coffers of the people who make money by moving money.

Okay, I digress. But you get the point. Now the stain on PB is dark and well deserved. And no marketing campaign, however honest, could have prevented it, nor can it make things better now. And yet I can’t help but wonder if things would be different if, ten years ago, BP had decided to change its company culture along with its logo.

What if they took some of the by-now billions spent on the re-branding campaign and embarked on a corporate-wide initiative to generate new ideas for viable alternative energy sources and increased safety? And funded it proportionately to the scope of the need. What if they had recognized the business imperative of protecting the natural areas they simultaneously exploited? You know, the kinds of things that lead to long-term profits. Honestly. Would things have been different? Who can say?

In the end, if anything good comes out of this, maybe one will be a lesson for companies to put their values where their brand is. And vice versa. To realize that sustainability isn’t a marketing initiative. It’s a strategic imperative. Maybe we as consumers will become more aware of the truth behind companies who hide behind facades. And maybe, just maybe, that shift in how companies position themselves for success will help prevent something like this from ever happening again.