As an Art Director I am a firm believer that Design is not art. It is a creative effort but not art. Art in my opinion is for art’s sake, and can portray something (or not portray it) in any way the artist sees fit. Design is purposeful, and must communicate a message and enact its viewer or user. Hopefully it is done in a meaningful, memorable, and creative manner.

VW is notorious for great advertising and design has a new series of ads (by DDB Berlin) which use classic art as the vehicle for the message. I like them, a lot, but I think there are some pure artists and pure designers who would disagree with using art in advertising like this. Take a look closely, at the details, as each piece of these recreations is very carefully crafted.

In this age of high tech social marketing tactics like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr to help engage the customer, it seems like face-to-face customer service tactics can get a bit lost. Well, I was fortunate to see that for some, old-fashioned customer service is still a priority. I recently experienced first-rate treatment at, believe it or not, an auto repair center.

I had been taking my truck to The Car Repair Company for routine maintenance and occasional repairs, but I hadn’t been in for a couple of years. Well, one day the maintenance light in my truck went on and so I took it to The Car Repair Company. They still had me on record and told me come on in and they’d take care of it.

Now here are the three things that I felt exemplified above normal customer service:

1. Like everyone in the car business, The Car Repair Company has had some challenges, but Jim Atkinson, the owner, was very upbeat when I came in. They normally will give you a lift to your work when you drop off your car. I thought with business being tight and all, that I would have get my own ride. But Jim, yes the owner, said that he would still take me to my office if I needed a lift, and he did.
2. They informed me that one of the repairs would take overnight, but I told them that I had no other transportation at my disposal, so I would bring in my truck in the morning. Jim felt that the repair on the lower ball joints should be done for safety reasons and offered to rent me a car and deduct the cost of the rental from the price of the repair. Not too many places would offer that.
3. I had one glitch on my transmission service, but I didn’t come back to The Car Repair Company for few weeks to get it checked out. Instead of saying it had been too long, Jim told me to just bring it in. A minor inspection and minor adjustment was done while I waited and at no cost to me.

I’ve always liked the Car Repair Company, but this one experience demonstrated a commitment to customer service that wasn’t just lip service. It solidified my loyalty to them over other service centers. Most importantly, it reminded me that as an agency, Park&Co needs to keep doing the most for our clients at every opportunity in order to keep their loyalty. Like The Car Repair Company, it’s what we demonstrate above the norm that makes the biggest and most lasting impressions on our clients.

On October 13, Park&Co hosted the Phoenix creative community for its latest “Creative Connect” gathering. At the event we wanted to see what would happen if you arm some of the Valley’s most creative people with a blank canvas and a few sharpies. The result was truly remarkable.

If you were at the event you likely participated in our “conversation board” experiment. If not, then watch the video below to see what happened when the people in attendance were asked to do what they do best - be creative.

Did you know that Arizona has nearly $4 billion in annual bi-lateral trade with our neighbors to the north? No, not Nevada, Utah or Colorado, but Canada. The Great White North is the largest foreign investor in Arizona, according to Glenn Williamson, CEO and Founder of the Canada Arizona Business Council (CABC).

The CABC was formed seven years ago to promote a single mandate: To increase bi-lateral trade between Canada and Arizona to $5 billion by 2010.

Currently:

• 128,750 Arizona jobs have been created by Canadian businesses
• More than 140 private companies are directly involved
• 517,000 annual Canadian visitors spend upwards of $441 million in Arizona
• Conversely, 161,800 Arizonans visit Canada spending $110 million annually

Park&Co recently launched the new CABC website during the quarterly board meeting hosted at Henkel, owner of Dial, Purex, Right Guard and other popular consumer product brands. Park&Co is a title CABC partner, along with other notable companies such as the Toronto Stock Exchange, Henkel, Air Canada, Chase and Snell & Wilmer.

From the site: Membership in the CABC is by invitation only. This membership philosophy assures each member one degree of separation with decision makers in any field on either side of the border. If you are an engaged industry player, we welcome your membership inquiry…of course, only deal makers need apply.

Richard Bazinet, Founding Director of the CABC, said,

“Rebuilding our website was an important part of our web-centric communications strategy. Not an easy task for a bi-lateral trade organization like the CABC. However, Park&Co rose to the challenge and they actually mastered the subject matter quickly. Our new site was accepted unanimously by our members.”

Here’s the thing about numbers – they suck. They cloud people’s judgment. They associate meaning to things that are meaningless and often take away from what really matters.

Take sports. Let’s compare A-Rod’s statistics to Scott Brosious’s, the man who stood at third base just a few years prior to A-Rod in New York. Scott Brosious, who retired in 2001, is a career .257 hitter with a total of 141 home runs. A-Rod is a career .306 hitter with 553 home runs. Over his entire decade-plus career, Scott Brosious didn’t make nearly the sum of money that A-Rod will this year alone at $28,000,000. Yet if they each strolled down Broadway, New Yorkers would heap praise upon Mr. Brosious in a way A-Rod could only dream.

Why? Because beyond all the numbers that A-Rod’s accumulated he hasn’t provided moments or built relationships the way Scott Brosious has. The clutch hitting and late-inning dramatics that Brosious provided is the equity that has made him a Yankee legend despite his pedestrian numbers. So what does this mean? It means that if you’re spending time worrying about accumulating more Twitter followers and monitoring your blog traffic your missing opportunities to build moments and share experiences that naturally make you more valuable.

I’m done trying to poke holes in social media outlets. They aren’t the problem. Twitter is a perfectly effective and maybe even revolutionary medium. The bigger problem is the people who use social media and their infatuation with building numbers instead of meaningful relationships.

We’re so concerned with numbers and having to measure something that we associate false values so we can rationalize our own existence. Right PR people? Height + Width X ad rate X 3 = PR value? Following that formula in PR makes us devalue the real target audience because we’re always searching for the biggest. It’s the same as building a social media campaign around accumulating followers instead of cultivating relationships. You neglect those that really matter.

“Our goal is to accumulate 10,000 followers by the end of this effort.” What happens if you achieve your goal? Now you’ve got 10,000 people who on the other end are just happy that you increased their numbers for them. How often do you actually go through and read what your followers have to say? Probably not often because you’re just happy to see that number on the right side of the page grow. Here’s a news flash – so is the person on the other end. They don’t really care about you either.

The sad part is we seem to be ok with that. As long as we see numbers grow or have something quantitative to shoot for we feel like we’re striving towards something. And the truth is, we are. It’s just that we’re striving towards something completely meaningless.

In a perfect world we’d say, “Screw numbers, they’ll come if we do our job right.” If we work to provide value to others and establish relationships the numbers will come in greater force than they ever could have otherwise. But it doesn’t work that way because it’s too damn hard. How do we measure if someone feels connected to our brand and how do we know if they feel compelled to share what we have to say with others? I sure don’t have the answer. But I do know that strategies built on numbers mislead and misrepresent. Ask A-Rod. Ask Scott Brosious.

Join Park&Co and the rest of the Phoenix creative community on Tuesday, October 13 as we host the latest Creative Connect. Meet some new faces and mingle with the old throughout Park&Co’s courtyard starting at 6 p.m.

Also, to support a good cause we’re asking that each person in attendance bring a bag of donations for Goodwill. There’s a Goodwill donations bin in the parking lot.

For more details, including a map to the office, check out the official Creative Connect page here. We look forward to seeing everyone on Tuesday.

Park&Co’s Summit Building has 1,589 square feet available. This fantastic space is in the heart of the Arcadia neighborhood, next to Pei Wei, Pita Jungle, Starbucks, Wildflower Bread Company, and other great amenities.

Check out some great photos of the nearby amenities at our flickr page for a look around the neighborhood and the great space.

See the Summit Building location on a map.

For more information, please call 602-957-7323.

As a marketing writer, I’m sensitive to words or phrases that seem to come out of nowhere and then get used and abused to the point of nausea. Here are four hackneyed examples that trigger a gag reflex every time I hear or see them. Let us kill them at once and dance and make merry upon their graves.  

Solution – This word is the kudzu of business communication. A decade ago, someone thought it was cute and introduced it into the American marketing lexicon. It has now spread to every corporate name, tagline or pitch on the continent. There are no products or services anymore, only solutions. For all its appetite, the term wields about as much descriptive power as whatchamacallit. Something to keep in mind next time you think of using it in reference to anything but an algebra problem.

Robust – This is a current favorite to describe any kind of system, website, program, intiative, menu, solution—let’s put it this way: if you can dream it up, there’s a way to describe it as robust. I think it’s supposed to mean that your thing has more features or characteristics than the average thing. What it really means is that they weren’t worth mentioning by name.

Best-in-Class – I’m told this particular virus came out of Detroit’s auto industry. How ironic is that? What class? Whose class? Under what authority and criteria are these things formed and judged? Call me a stickler, but I’m going to need a lot of supporting documentation when someone makes this kind of claim. Though yesterday, I made a trip to the men’s room, and I’m pretty confident in describing the result as best-in-class. Documentation provided upon request.

At The End Of The Day – Have you  noticed that nothing remotely significant happens in the morning or afternoon anymore. It’s like living in a bad Twilight Zone episode. There seems to be only one part of our 24-hour cycle that matters now. In the final analysis…that is to say, when all is said and done…I mean, the bottom line is…or rather, ultimately, it’s all about the end of the day.

Got a word or phrase giving you the dry heaves? Submit a comment.

What’s Happening in Vegas Isn’t Staying in Vegas

If you’re anywhere near Las Vegas Friday morning, and your interested in how to use online social media for water conservation, stop by the Southpoint Hotel and Conference Center for the WaterSmart Innovation Conference. I’m presenting my fishing analogy for deploying social media at 9 am.

The Water - Use It Wisely conservation campaign was one of the first in the water-saving business to have a focused, comprehensive strategy for online social media to share its 100+ ways to save water.

Here’s how we go fishing using social media:

1. We consider the Water - Use It Wisely website as our wharf where we process the fish we catch. In this case, the process is to offer a wealth of conservation information to consumers thirsty for content, including 100+ water-saving tips.
2. To get them to the wharf, we go trolling in the sea of prospects with our blog. We lure in folks with timely information on how they can start saving water and money now.
3. To reach as many people with our blog as possible, we cast the content through a number of social media fishing lines, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. And we make our content easy to share by including links to Digg, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, MySpace and more.

You can review my entire fishing analogy social media presentation on SlideShare.

I am also looking forward to tailoring this presentation for the Texas Regional Water Conference in Fort Worth on Tuesday, November 11. For those of you attending that workshop, feel free to review my landing page, Sustainable Social Media 101, and send me any questions you have prior to the event. That way I can focus my presentation to your needs.

And whether you’re in Vegas or Fort Worth, be sure to stop by a say hello.