We relocated to new offices last month after 16 years in the same building. As you can imagine, we had amassed a considerable amount of archive material, old equipment and junk, all carefully stored in our basement. Languishing, forgotten in one of the dark recesses, we came upon our original file server - a Macintosh SE/30, circa 1988. It was configured with a massive 8 MB of RAM and an 80 MB hard drive, which ran at a blistering 16 MHz clock speed! As I wiped off the dust I just wondered to myself. Would it still work after so many years of neglect and damp, not to mention a flood? We powered the old Apple Macintosh up and retired to a safe distance, cowering behind a solid desk just in case. Well, out rang the familiar start-up chime like a long lost friend. Then up came the screen, all nine inches of it, in glorious black and white. What a little marvel, welcome back!

The SE/30 was the forerunner to the current iMac range, a compact elegant computer in an all-in-one unit. It was quite a radical design at the time, although I remember Sun’s SPARCstation Voyager had a similar design philosophy but not a similar price. In 1994, the Voyager was aggressively priced at $13,995! Surprisingly, it didn’t sell, but became hot property when production stopped. Ironic.

Our Macintosh SE/30 now has pride of place in the Beechwood museum alongside a Sun-3 workstation. Not an extensive collection then, I hear you cry. No, but I wonder what will be in the museum in another 16 years? An antique iPhone? A quaint olde-worlde wireless mouse? Or maybe a strange object that used to be called a keyboard?

I first became aware of Wally Olins for the corporate identity work his company Wolff Olins produced for companies like BOC, 3i and Apple Records in 60s and 70s. So when the chance came to participate in an interview with the great man for the business magazine, Pipeline we published on behalf of IntercontinentalExchange, it seemed foolish to refuse.

Although the conversation with brand guru Olins took place six years ago, his insights are arguably more relevant now than ever. I hope you find it as interesting and thought provoking as I do.

The interview republished by kind permission of Philip Algar, economist and energy journalist in our Thinklets section.

The latest research findings from Forrester and Marketing Sherpa show that in 2009, email marketing is expected to rise in popularity.  Low cost, targeted and measurable, it isn’t surprising that so many businesses are planning to use email to communicate with customers and prospects.  However, with so much competition in the inbox, marketers need to get email savvy and ensure they maximise their ROI.

Click through the Beechwood Guide to creating a successful b2b email campaign (below) to find useful research, handy hints and tips for email marketers.

Beechwood recently polled marketing professionals and asked them, what was the most important factor when selecting a marketing agency?

The results of the survey found that the three most important criteria for selection were:

1. Demonstration of results
2. Industry experience
3. Cultural fit

Given the pressure on marketing professionals in these difficult times to achieve measurable success, it was perhaps little surprise that 50% of participants considered an agency’s ability to demonstrate results as the number one factor.  This was closely followed by industry experience, with 42% considering this to be the first priorty in agency selection.

However, many marketers were keen to point out that these factors alone would not ensure a good fit between agency and client.  As one Senior Marketing Officer for a major financial corporation remarked, “The most relevant factor is how good a cultural fit you sense between the agency and the group managing it.  I’ve seen excellent agencies and great brand teams collide due to a poor cultural fit.  And egos have a huge role in generating the “fit” sensation”.

This week, the Beechwood team went to a Russian restaurant to celebrate Russia’s “Old New Year” (a tradition celebrating New Year according to the Julian calendar).

My colleague Alina used the Internet to search for Russian restaurants in London. Browsing through several social media sites, she read restaurant reviews, looked at photos of restaurants and browsed through menus online, before she chose our venue. The restaurant was in the basement of a London hotel. Off the beaten track, the hotel itself was tricky to find. The restaurant within was even harder to locate, infact, there were no signs to indicate its existence.

Yet, we found ourselve in this busy basement restaurant, where every table was in use. As one of the team commented, “you wouldn’t just stumble upon this place; you would have to know about it”. My point is that the Internet has turned marketing on its head. In their 2008 benchmark survey for technology marketers, Marketing Sherpa found that 93% of those involved in the purchase of technology begin the sales cycle with an online search. Furthermore, 80% of those technology purchasers said that they found the vendor, that’s just 20% who were found by the vendor.

With the explosion of social media in the B2B world, marketers need to identify the online directories, forums and blogs most visited by their target audiences. Contribute to social networks and make sure your business and its solutions are highly visible online…you might not find the buyers, but they will find you.

Surviving the economic downturn will be high on the list of priorities for most businesses in 2009. However, in addition to the challenges, Beechwood believe that there will be some opportunities too.

Many independent studies have shown that in previous recessions, those businesses that continued to invest in marketing and advertising during a downturn went on to outperform those that didn’t. Now is not the time for across the board cuts in the marketing budget, but the time to take a considered approach to allocating the marketing spend.

Looking back at historical success stories, you are unlikely to find the answers for beating this recession. The marketing landscape has changed dramatically; during the last recession did blogging, social marketing, email campaigns and viral marketing even feature on the marketing plan?

With the rapid evolution of marketing over the past decade, traditional media has declined and digital marketing has grown in importance and effectiveness. Across Europe and the US, online behaviour patterns have changed considerably and we spend more time online and less time exposed to traditional marketing channels like the television. Therefore, we have to reassess our channels of communication and select the most appropriate marketing tools.

Technological innovation has broken down traditional national market boundaries and the global marketplace is well and truly open for business. There are opportunities for business, the challenge is making sure you can keep pace with economic change and quickly deploy marketing solutions to convert them.

McKinsey & Company recommend in their report “The downturn’s new rules for marketers”, that marketers regularly reprioritise geographies and target customers to ensure they pursue those with the greatest profit potential.

Finally, I would like to wish all of our clients a prosperous 2009, happy new year!

On September 29th, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index plunged and all of its constituents’ stocks fell, all bar one: the Campbell Soup Company. Investors flocked to the iconic brand, which makes some of America’s favourite soups and its shares went up by 0.3 percent. That’s a very good clue to the type of brands that will prosper in 2009 - those that represent good quality and excellent value for money.

According to Interbrand, as value for money rises up the consumers’ agenda, two early beneficiaries of consumers’ changing mood have been German hard-discount supermarket chains Aldi and Lidl (read Mark’s blog on brand names, coming soon), which have been gaining market share across Europe from established giants. It used to be shameful for the middle-class to shop at discounter stores but now their brands suggest intelligent buying.

For consumer, read business. I believe now is the time for agencies to respond as partners to their clients in these challenging times with solutions that deliver good quality and excellent value for money. The flight to value is for all of us to embrace. As a marketing agency, Beechwood have always liked to think we offer our clients value. And with the current weakness of sterling against the dollar we now offer our US clients more value than ever.

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’.