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.

Working with American technology-based clients consequently means working with our cousins from across the water. American Craig Storti’s book Americans at Work is very insightful. It offers advice for those who need to understand more about how Americans work and there are some fundamental differences. Beechwood has selected some direct quotes on the differences in business culture and they are found in one of our Thinklets. Enjoy!

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

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?

There’s a scene in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982) in which a photograph is constantly enlarged until the subject is clearly visible - pure science fiction. Well no, take a look at this photograph of Barrack Obama’s 2009 Inauguration in which you can zoom in on the image to see the smallest detail. It’s made up of 220 images and the final image size is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels, 295 times the standard 5 megapixel camera. An architectural photographer friend of mine said a number of years ago that we wouldn’t shoot digitally because the detail wasn’t there yet!

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!

Over dinner the other evening, I got into discussions with a colleague’s husband, a data centre architect about the halting of data centre construction in central London. He says the culprit is the 2012 Olympic Games in London. The City of London has a power demand of 1,000MK which is expected to increase by 80 per cent over the next 5-7 years, while Docklands, home of several data centres has a power demand of 250MK, which is predicted to rise to 90 percent over the same period. It’s claimed that political prioritisation has occurred to ensure the games’ success so risking the UK’s financial sector. Chris Crosby, VP of Digital Reality, the largest provider of data centres in the world, says “There’s the potential now for London to go technology-dry because of the lack of power”.

The broader question, has the government dithered over what is probably one of the most critical issues for business, a clear strategic policy to provide energy security for the next ten years and be compliant with its own CO2 emission targets? Review the BBC’s survey findings, it’s very insightful.