If you can't beat your enemy, attack its friends

Greenpeace led a highly effective campaign to persuade Lego to abandon its joint branding initiative with Shell.

Over a million people signed a petition to persuade Lego not to renew its contract to supply Shell-branded Lego products. This raises some very interesting issues.

1. The opportunity for brands with a poor consumer perception to associate themselves with a highly credible brand can be positive. By doing so, Shell were looking at distracting its customers from the negativity surrounding its brand. Much like organisations choose to use celebrity endorsement as a way of associating themselves with a much more glamorous and desirable personality, this form of co-branding can help normalise the perception of the lead brand.

2. Pressure groups, like Greenpeace, have the opportunity to target a broad range of stakeholders of the organisation against whom they wish to protest. Clearly, Lego were not happy to see their brand being tarnished any further. The video above provides a rather shocking example of how Lego's brand image can be distorted.

3. The YouTube video (above) was reportedly Greenpeace's most successful viral campaign. This shows that if the content is well-executed and correctly targeted, social media's power to influence is as strong as ever.

So we can re-write the adage that "your enemy's enemy is your friend" to say " your enemy's friend is your enemy".