I was lucky enough to be invited to attend the first major conference dedicated to how the Aerospace and Defence industry can help combat climate change. The Energy and Environmental Defence and Security Conference (E2DS’09) held at the RSA, London on November 5th to 6th gave a fascinating insight. Sponsors included Rolls Royce, EADS, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Saab, Northrop Grumman, ITT, Finmeccanica, ADS, ASD and others.

The extent of the very real climate change threat that we face was hammered home by keynote speaker Dr Berrien Moore, co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

This illuminating and thought provoking conference was a result of the vision of Nick Cook, journalist and MD of Dynamixx, the organisers of the event. As Nick said, “Our mission is to create a dynamic forum for the Aerospace and Defence community and so foster dialogue, debate and analysis of the many opportunities that await it in the energy and environmental arenas.”

Here at Beechwood, we’ve developed creative marcoms campaigns for our technology clients on The Greening of the Data Centre, Energy Efficiency, IT for the Environment and more. So it’s reassuring to think that, maybe one day, the Aerospace, Defence, IT and Technology sectors will all combine together to take up the challenge of climate change through collaboration and innovation.

http://dynamixx-e2d.com

With congratulations to Roz Littlewood and Graham Hart for managing such a successful event.

The recently announced, UK’s 12th annual Superbrands analysis saw Microsoft regain the number one position and Apple join the top 10 for the first time.

This yearly analysis of the top 500 brands is carried out by The Centre for Brand Analysis and measures brands not by value but by how much they are trusted by the British public. The brands are judged against three factors, quality, reliability and distinction.

It’s interesting to compare the results of this survey with the top twenty most valuable brands as detailed in a previous blog. There are some similarities, some differences and, of course, in the UK list of Superbrands, positions that may be a surprise to some of our clients in the US and EMEA

This survey defines a Superbrand as having established “the finest reputation in its field,” offering “significant emotional and/or tangible advantages over other brands, which customers want and recognise.”

Around 1,400 brands are considered by a panel of experts and more than 2,000 UK consumers take part in the voting.

The Top Twenty Five:

1 Microsoft
, 2 Rolex, 3 Google
, 4 British Airways, 5 
BBC
, 6 Mercedes-Benz
, 7 Coca-Cola, 8 
Lego
, 9 Apple, 10 Encyclopedia Britannica, 11 Virgin Atlantic, 12 Duracell, 13 Marks and Spencer, 14 Philadelphia, 15 Dulux, 16 BMW, 17 Colmans, 18 Dyson, 19 Ordnance Survey, 20 Nintendo, 21 Jaguar, 22 Sony, 23 BP, 24 Fisher-Price and 25 Andrex.

I was recently sent a document detailing all the international web domains by country. (Don’t ask why) So I am now the proud owner of a list that goes all the way from the Ascension Islands (.ac) to Zimbabwe (.zw). Reading through it gave me plenty of food for thought.

For instance, did you know that that Jersey (.je), Guernsey (.gg) and the Isle of Man (.im) have their own suffixes although they are part of the United Kingdom (.uk)? I certainly didn’t.

And did you know that .um was the domain suffix for United States Minor Outlying Islands? No? I’ve never heard of them either. The United States Minor Outlying Islands are in fact a group of islands, which includes Palmyra Atoll. None of the islands has any permanent residents - the population consisting of only temporarily stationed scientific and military personnel (316 at the last census!).

Looking at some of the more exotic and far-flung places in the directory reminded me of the island of Tuvalu and how its .tv suffix became quite a popular web domain for businesses in the world of television to adopt.

So how long before the following urls become sought after?

Cape Verde (.cv) – a must for recruitment consultants and headhunters

Croatia/Hrvatska (.hr) – for all Human Resources professionals

Guernsey (.gg) – for jockeys, horse breeders or bookmakers

Iraq (.iq) for Mensa members perhaps

Oman (.om) for practitioners of meditation

And finally Moldova (.md) for Managing Directors

More alternative uses for country code top-level domains will follow in a later blog. In the meantime, please send in any suggestions of your own.

I’ve just reread the late Paul Arden’s  ’It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be’. It’s a gem of a little book that uses the creative processes of good advertising as a metaphor for business practice. Rather like the way that Machiavelli’s The Prince is written about power and government but is used as a guide to management.

As executive creative director of Saatchi and Saatchi, and I quote Dave Trott writing in The Independent newspaper, “Arden was the ringmaster behind the whole creative circus that saw British Airways become ‘The World’s Favourite Airline’ The Independent become the new intelligentsia’s favourite newspaper, Margaret Thatcher the nation’s favourite leader and Silk Cut their favourite fag (English slang for a cigarette for any American readers).”

One fascinating extract from the book in particular got me thinking about the strategy, positioning and marketing of brands for business start-ups. And how it’s essential when developing a brand from the beginning, from a blank canvass so to speak, to have a clear, simple focus and vision.

“When Charles Saatchi started his ad agency it was regarded as a creative boutique. His brief for the company stationery was to make it look like a bank (about fifteen years later they tried to buy one bank).

He also invested a third of his capital in a full-page advertisement in The Times.

The effect was to make his creative boutique appear an established company.”

A simple, clear brand strategy with a big impact marcoms activity to help start making the brand vision a reality. But what else would you expect from Saatchi and Arden?

Google, became the world’s first $100 billion brand this week according to a report to a business analysis report by BrandZ. While studying the paper, we were all struck by the number of technology brands in the top 20. The power of the brand in the technology sector is stronger than ever and as important as ever. Especially in today’s economic climate, where the brand can help see businesses through difficult times. 

As everyone knows Google was named as a misspelling of Googol - the number one with 100 noughts after it. So, even at 100 billion, the brand has quite a few noughts to collect before it reaches parity with its parent!

Top twenty most valuable brands 2009 in $M:

Google - 100,039; Microsoft - 76,249; Coca-Cola  - 67,625; IBM - 66,622; McDonalds- 66,575; Apple - 66,113; China Mobile - 61,283; General Electric - 59,793; Vodafone 53,727; Marlboro 49,460; Wal-Mart 41,083; ICBC 38,056; Nokia 35,163; Toyota 29,907; UPS 27,842; Blackberry 27,478; HP  26,745; BMW 23,948; SAP 23,615; Disney 23,110

The creation and origins of company names – so central to their brand and image – springs up quite a few surprises. Some company names, that we now take for granted, come from interesting sources of inspiration. Others are just plain safe and dull. So let’s run through an alphabet of company names.

We start, as usual, with A is for… Apple.

Apple  - As everyone knows the Apple Macintosh is named after the American variety of apple called the McIntosh and was chosen in part because Steve Jobs had worked on an Apple Farm one summer. It is also suggested that Jobs was a great fan of The Beatles’ record label Apple. A further theory, (truth unknown) is that the Apple logo with the bite taken out was a homage to Alan Turing.

Alan Turing is considered the father of modern computer science. He worked at Bletchley Park during World War II as a code-breaker and helped cracked the Enigma machine. He was also a homosexual who, when outed, it is rumoured, committed suicide by eating from a cyanide laced apple.

Alfa Romeo -  the company was originally known as ALFA, an acronym for Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili. When Nicola Romeo bought ALFA in 1915, his surname was added to make the brand name we know now.

Adidas - the German sports-good company takes its name from its founder Adolf Dassler or ‘Adi’ Dassler, as he was known.

Adobe -  it is said that the U.S. software company was named after the little creek that ran past the homes of founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke.

Aldi - the German discounter store (see Chris’s blog ‘Flight to Value’) is also named after its founders. It takes the first two letters of the family name ‘Albrecht’ and the first two letters of the word ‘discount’. Cunning huh?

Asda - the British Supermarket chain comes from an abbreviation of Associated Dairies.

Asus - the company takes its name from, Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology. The first three letters of the name were dropped to place the company name in a higher position in the alphabet. Perhaps we should change our name to Eechwood.

Aston Martin - the British car company’s name comes from the founder Lionel Martin and the Aston Hill races near Birmingham, UK where the company was first founded.

Atari - this word comes from the language of the Japanese board game ‘Go’. ‘Atari’ is when all of an opponent’s stones are threatened with capture - a bit like ‘check’ in chess, apparently.

Audi - the car manufacturer was founded by Lionel Horch in 1909.  He took the name from the Latin translation of horch (hark in English). Audi is the imperative form of audire - to hear.

A&M records -  was named after its founders Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss.  Incidentally Moss,  also a  very successful  horse breeder, named one of his horses Zenyatta after The Police’s third album Zenyatta Mondatta.

Amstrad  - the British electronics company is a contraction of Alan Michael Sugar Trading. We’re sorry Alan but when it comes to originality in name creation ‘You’re fired!’

Working with brands across EMEA, as a copywriter and creative director, I’ve seen my fair share of language translation glitches.  So when I was sent this little nugget of knowledge I just had to share it.  Some English phrases were translated by computer, one way and back again, using 5 different languages.  How did the software cope with 10 consecutive translations of the same piece of copy?  Judge for yourself.

1) I’m a little teapot, short and stout.
became
They are a small potentiometer, short circuits and a beer of malzes of the tea.

2) A cookie is just a cookie, but fig newtons are fruit and cake.
became
Biskuit has expert of biskuit, but Newton von Fig is fruit and hardens.

3) When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.
became
If the moon fixes its eye like a great vector of Fleischpie of the vector of Pizzapie, is the lover.

Laugh? I almost cracked my ribeye steaks. One final point, at Beechwood, we always use mother tongue translators for all our client’s EMEA  localisation work.  We find it’s a better way or which after 10 translations becomes  - ‘We discovered it, an avenue of butter’.

As so much of our creative work for Pitney Bowes MapInfo revolves around location intelligence and the power of mapping, I was struck by a new book The Atlas of the Real World. Produced by worldmapper.org, this reference book contains 366 digitally modified maps, known as cartograms. It shows the world in demographics using a wide range of categories from wealth and poverty to Internet use. Here are just a few examples of an atlas of the world as you’ve never seen it before.

Land area

The size of each territory represents its land area in proportion to that of the others. This gives us a very different perspective from the usual Mercator projection we usually see of the world.

Land area

Internet users in 1990

The size of each territory indicates the number of people who were using the Internet way back in 1990. Only 3 million people had access to the Internet then -  73 percent of these were in the United States and 15 percent in Western Europe.

Internet users in 1990

Internet users in 2002

The size of each territory indicates the number of Internet users in the world by 2002. There were 631 million with substantial numbers in Asia-Pacific, Australasia, South Asia, South America, Eastern Europe and China. Hasn’t the world changed?

Internet Users in 2002

The Atlas of the Real World is published by Thames and Hudson