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.

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.

 Baseball has always been a huge part of my life. I would literally choose a July game between the Royals and Orioles over NFL football any Sunday. That’s why it pains me to say I’m embarrassed to be an Arizona Diamondbacks fan. 

As opening day approaches I’m sure Diamondbacks president Derrick Hall and the folks in the front office are putting their collective heads together to come up with the next ridiculous between-inning promotion. We already have the Chevron car race, hot dog race, Taco Bell race, shuffling hats, trivia challenge, Fry’s giveaway, Bobcat mascot, and entertainment squad (code for cheerleaders). You know what they have in New York? An organ and the seventh inning stretch.

Are we so starved for entertainment that we can’t sit without a mind numbing marketing ploy for two minutes between innings? Recently, Derrick Hall was featured in the Arizona Republic talking about his family approach to running a team. I’m all for that. But it’s baseball. It’s already family friendly. And before you say the game moves too slowly or your child doesn’t understand it, how about you spend those two minutes between innings teaching him or her the game. I promise you those few minutes will be more meaningful and family friendly than any taco/burrito race.  

This speaks to a bigger problem - our inability to focus and appreciate as a society. We’re so busy trying to consume that all we do is clamor for information and stimulation.  This causes businesses and marketers to constantly try to put information out there. But the problem is when you run out of good things to say you end up shouting louder or repeating yourself. So now the same mentality that crowds the media and makes mush of interesting new methods of communication has crept into our national pastime and we should be embarrassed. 

I’ve been a season ticket holder and sat in the same seats since the inaugural season. I was at the first game in 1998 and Game 7 in 2001 and now I’m afraid to say I’m a Diamondbacks fan. All of the original season ticket holders around us have left and are now replaced by out of town fans laughing at our expense as the crowd roars with passion when mustard beats relish but sits idly by for anything actually happening on the field. 

I don’t want to put all of the blame on the Diamondbacks but I’m pretty sure if they simply stopped, or at least dramatically reduced, the between-inning circus it wouldn’t take long before the crowd began appreciating the game again. Fathers would explain to their sons and daughters the importance of going first to third, bunting, and the infield fly rule instead of wrestling to get on the “kiss cam.”

If the Diamondbacks front office thinks this market needs baseball with bells and whistles, then clearly they haven’t ventured to any of the packed spring training facilities. It is here that baseball is at its purest. Where the game feels, smells and tastes the way it should. I’d like to ask Mr. Hall to go to one of those games and truly watch and listen. What he’ll find is a crowd, city, and state that appreciates this game and expects much more with much less from its hometown organization.

I’m about to say two things that are probably going to be very unpopular around the office: I’m not an “Apple” guy, and I’m not all that keen on advertising. Before there’s a “here we go again” moment — since I bashed my own field of PR a few weeks back, let me once again explain.

I get Apple. I get that they’re innovators. I have an iPod. But I’m not going to drive around with the sticker on my car. They just don’t excite me as much as some people. As for advertising, I think it can make a tremendous impact, but that doesn’t usually happen. The vast majority of ads are stale and contrived and I’m continually amazed that they make it through agency and client approvals.

That being said, the marriage of these two things just sparked something that I’m comfortable saying is the best advertisement I have seen in years. Every day I read The New York Times online, and never once have I clicked on, let alone noticed, an ad on the site. But today, as I was reading the front-page article, that changed.

I couldn’t help but be drawn to the right side of the page and the blaring headline “Stop Switching to Mac!” as written by PC. The copy focuses on PC’s deficiencies and asks that PC’s once loyal customers stick with it, ensuring them that eventually they’d turn it around. Of course the ad bashes Mac, as well, asking whether customers have gotten sick of all the Mac superlatives. I saw all of this even before I discovered there was sound and visuals bringing in the now famous Mac and PC personalities to narrate.

A lot of money? Of course. It must have cost a ton to keep that ad up there all day. But before everyone says that if they had Apple’s budget they could create something as clever and effective, let me say that this ad’s effectiveness has more to do with message than with budget. This is what happens when the first thing asked in a creative meeting is “How can we get people talking?” It’s a simple approach, but one rarely taken. Usually the first question asked is “How do we spend this money?”

When the focus is switched to buzz and conversations, you can see the results. It’s clear that Apple worked across departments to achieve this ad’s effectiveness. Media planners and buyers who think their job is all about numbers and not creativity need look no further than this ad for inspiration.

I still don’t love Apple, and until they create something that allows me to download warm, soft, chocolate chip cookies, I probably never will. But I have to hand it to them for providing us with a real life, real-time case study on what advertising is all about.

A lot of us have done street marketing, and its effectiveness can often be debated.  Recently however, a Phoenix resident took to the streets, and found it was the perfect method for selling his product – himself. 

Corey Gibisch, 36 years-old and six weeks removed from being laid off from his comfortable management-level aerospace industry position, explained that he needed to take his job search to “extreme measures.”  The extreme measures he was referring to included triple digit heat and cars racing by just feet away.  That’s the price the Phoenix man thought he had to pay for finding a new job in today’s economy as he took himself and a hand-written sign to a busy Phoenix intersection early last week.   

Check out the full story by Dennis Wagner in the Arizona Republic

Gibisch explains that in the six weeks since he had been laid off, he had done all the traditional job search methods but to no avail.  So his instinct told him to “do something crazy.”  As Gibisch stood on the street corner with a sign that read, “Will Work Hard for Good Company” and a fistful of resumes, his biggest fear was embarrassing his wife and kids.  Turns out his real fear should have been what job opportunity to choose from.  Hours later upon his return home, Gibisch already had multiple voice mails and even more emails regarding new opportunities.  Even more importantly, in the two hours Gibisch spent on the busy freeway overpass, he managed to hand out 100 resumes and collect 30 business cards.  Try doing that in two hours online. 

Here’s a guy who seems to have little to no marketing experience yet he perfectly executed something many of us are still trying to master: a great word of mouth marketing campaign.  The truth is that it doesn’t take much experience or high-level marketing education to be successful in word of mouth.  Those things help but what you really need is exactly what Mr. Gibisch perfectly displayed, the foresight and fortitude to understand that the status quo only achieves status quo results. 

He took a buzzworthy idea, supplemented it with quality materials to keep the conversation going (in his case, resumes), engaged people directly, and the next thing you know he’s the talk of the town.  Without knowing it, he put the tenets of a successful word of mouth campaign into practice as though they were written in a schoolbook case study, or more likely a title penned by WOM guru Andy Sernovitz.  People love a great story.  People love a success story even more and I can imagine companies clamoring to be recognized as the company that hired Mr. Gibisch. 

Let’s hope that one of these companies recognizes the importance of word of mouth in today’s marketing landscape and gives Mr. Gibisch the chance to put more of his “extreme measure” tactics into action. 

A new study shows that just being exposed to the Apple logo can make you more creative, according to Duke researcher Gavan Fitzsimons. He was featured last Saturday on NPR discussing his recent article in the Journal of Consumer Research about his study on logos and the brain. Take a timeout for 2.5 minutes and listen to this interview. Extremely interesting about the brand power of Apple over IBM and how differently the two brands are perceived by consumers.

The Economist published a story about the effects of pricing on the human brain. According to the study, which was undertaken by Cal Tech, humans physically respond as much to price as they do to actual taste.

By using a process known as functional magnetic-resonance imaging, Dr. Antonio Rangel was able to measuure the amount of blood flow to certain parts of the brain during consumption of different types of wine. Twenty test subjects were told that they were tasting five different types of wine which ranged in price from $5 to $90. In fact, there were only three wines, from which the subjects were served two at a time. Dr. Rangel made some astounding discoveries. When people were told that they were drinking a $10 wine, they rated it as only half as good as a $90 wine, although they were actually drinking a $90 wine. The readings from Dr. Rangel’s functional MRI supported those feelings. In his tests, the subject’s brains actually showed increased blood flow to the areas of the brain that reflect pleasant experiences when they believed they were drinking more expensive wine. These results were not confined to casual wine drinkers. When the Stanford University wine club was presented with the same tests, they returned simlilar results.

What do these findings suggest to those of us in advertising and marketing? The tests reflect that price is physiologically perceived as an indicator of quality. The more we pay, the better it tastes (or, presumably, sounds or drives or looks). This could strongly influence how we feature prices in our advertising. Working in advertising means working in a world of perception. With scientific evidence that how people perceive things actually leads to physical reaction, advertisers everywhere should be taking notice.