ABSTRACT
Royal Dutch/Shell Group United Kingdom's (UK) 1995 attempt to dump Brent Spar, a redundant North Sea oil installation, despite its reputation for scenario planning. This chapter focuses on aspects of the Brent Spar case that are most relevant to greener marketing: communications, the international dimension, environmental innovation, and alliance building. It presents three distinct stages in the history of the case. In Stage 1, the company's main emphasis was on compliance with UK regulatory requirements. Stage 2 was characterised by confrontation with Greenpeace, who rejected the criteria on which Shell's decision-making was based. In Stage 3, Shell placed more emphasis on communication as a two-way process, which enabled a less environmentally damaging solution to be found. Shell's journey with Brent Spar from compliance, through confrontation, to communication, a major change in the culture of the organisation, characterised by a greater openness to the world outside its corporate boundaries.
