NP sticks dipstick to global brands

With a slew of slick advertising designed to take the fight to the multi-nationals, National  Petroleum (NP) wants back badly the lubricant oil market. In so doing, NP has  put foreign brands, like Castrol and Shell, on notice that they are going to have to fight harder to keep their turf. “If NP is about lubes, then where are the lubes? If NP is about marketing, then where is the marketing?” said Energy Minister Eric Williams at an NP re-branding ceremony at the Center of Excellence last week. Taking a jab at NP’s management team, the Minister said he believed that those leaders who become complacent will lose their competitive edge and innovative capacity. “In order to stay ahead of the competition, management must continuously seek new ways, new paths to stay ahead of the game,” he said.

Companies must seek new ways to reinvent themselves, he said. One way to do this was tapping into the CSME when that comes on stream and supply lubricants to the region. The flip side of the CSME, he said, could mean a loss of market dominance, when the trade barriers come down. But on the plus side, he spoke about NP’s opportunities like its blending plant that now blends for international companies like Total, Texaco and Shell. According to Brian Look Hong, Visual Manager, Marketing, NP, the company dominated the lubricants market in 1994, noting that it got no marketing support for 10 years. surveys conducted by the company found out that those in the 18-35 age group had  no appreciation for the NP brand. The foreign oil was percieved as a better brand, he said. Some of the comments on NP oil were unkind : “It is not good,” to “Is NP an oil?”   He said the credibility gap between the quality of oil and what customers believe it is, was great.

While NP was sitting on its laurels, the foreign brands ran riot, so much so that NP was totally shut out of the roll-on, roll-off market. The company hopes to mend its ways. In TT, Look Hong said it was not the foreign oils that had the highest rating. NP, he said, had such a rating for the past few years.   NP, Williams said,  has always been a leader and innovator on the lubricants market and has kept pace with international trends in research and development. With certification from the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the American Society of Testing and Materials, the company has been able to bring the latest global developments of R&D even before those multinationals with popular brands on the local market. Gerard Acosta, NP CEO, said the management team was not only looking at margins alone but the entire business.  “What’s a 32-year old company to do ? We stop, pause and listen to what the consumers are saying,” Acosta told  the audience. “We stopped advertising for 10 years and still stayed the market leader,” he said.

The NP board, he said, understood why advertising was needed to regain market share. It was evident that NP pushed the advertising button hard. To the music of the “Sound  of Silence” the tag line at the end of the ad says, “Hear the difference technology makes.” Corbin Communications won the marketing bid from other competitors. Douglas Brunton, creative director at Corbin says they had to go Costa Rica to do the ad.  Everything was done digitally, he said after the launch, noting that the ad agency felt that this was going to have more impact. Why Costa Rica?  “It was cheaper for the quality and the time frame which we had to work with,” he said. “There was nobody in TT who could have done that ad in 30 days,” he said. Lawford Duprey, NP Chairman said he believed that the company had reached a turn-a-round point in the lubricant market. NP’s dominance in the market, he said, had been eroded over the past few years by multinational brands. “We conceded without a fight,” he said.