With companies striving to be more ethical and sustainable, are their good deeds and spotless reputations be inviting media to jump on their first mistake?

Patrick Byers thinks so, but only if we are talking about oil companies. Byers, author of the Responsible Marketing Blog, wrote a fantastic post back in July about how “‘Good deeds invite bad publicity’ takes the bridge too far.” Byers talks about a working paper published in the Harvard Business Review which claims that oil companies who make strong corporate social responsibility claims often garner additional criticism.

A direct quote from the paper is as follows:

We find the media far more likely to report accidents if they occur at a company

with a superior CSR record. Rather than acting as an effective form of insurance,

our results suggest that a strong CSR record can be a liability.

The first example of this to pop into my mind was the BP oil spill that occurred back in 2006. Considering the media storm that surrounded this accident, and the damage inflicted to BP’s reputation, most people cannot believe that BP was ranked on the  Global 100 list of the “Most Sustainable Companies in the World” in 2005 and 2006.

Given the environmental track records of oil companies, it is logical for the public to be skeptical of corporate social responsibility efforts that some companies proudly boast of. When companies like BP cannot deliver on their ethical obligations to the public and their stakeholders, it is inevitable that they will draw more negative attention than if they hadn’t been bragging about their good deeds in the first place.

Byers’ final argument, which I completely agree with, is that the Harvard Business Review paper cannot make a statement implying that “good deeds invite bad publicity” because the reputations of oil companies are very different from those of every other company.