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’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?

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?