Fridrik Larsen, CHARGE Founder and CEO.
In the current edition of our newsletter we are featuring an interview with Ryan O’Keeffe, Managing Director of BlackRock’s London office. I had met Ryan when he was Group Director of Communications at Enel. A number of exciting things he was doing there on branding caught my eye, so I was keen to catch up with him, once he settled in his new job.
In the interview, describing his career path, Ryan said that working in different industries such as energy and finance, gave him a “a lot of diversity of perspective”. I have to say, that phrase stuck with me. If there is one way to describe what CHARGE is about, I would have to say those exact words: diversity of perspective.
Now, you might think that an event whose chief topic is energy branding, meaning developing and communicating your energy brand, has a laser-sharp focus on a single topic. And you would be right. But, this doesn’t preclude diversity. In my mind, true depth of understanding does not come from darting around from one topic to the next. Rather, it means understanding your subject from many different perspectives, shining a light on it from a multitude of angles.
This is the philosophy we have tried to apply to CHARGE. In this we have been so ably assisted by our speakers. They are the ones who had brought every year fresh views, new insights and a willingness to share them with our audience. They were, and will be so again this year, a diverse crowd: engineers, communications experts, academics and business people. Renewable and conventional energy professionals from Europe, America and beyond.
That we are on the right track and need this wealth of views on the topic of energy branding, was made clear to me again and again, as I carried out the interviews which you can read on the CHARGE blog. Explaining their branding philosophy, each renowned energy professional seemed to be adding a piece of the jigsaw.
Ryan, for instance, said something I thought was priceless. I asked him what he would say to those who feel that B2B companies don’t need to worry about branding and he said: “B2B, B2C and B2G labels are all wrong… The best way of thinking about branding is B2H, business to human.” There you go.
Now, while waiting for an interviewer to come along and ask me about my “event philosophy” I feel it would be best to sum up what we have been trying to do thus far: have many great speakers, from a variety of energy business backgrounds, talk about what makes a successful energy brand. Our event philosophy in one word? Diversity.
