Natural evolution is the ultimate form of innovation. If you pay attention, nature can teach all businesses how to thrive, no matter how nasty the economic environment.

Earlier this year, we were privileged to help rebrand Clinica Adelante; a community clinic that was founded to serve the health care needs of farm workers in Maricopa County, AZ 30 years ago.

In that time, their business environment has changed dramatically. Immigration laws and urban sprawl have significantly impacted their patient population. State and federal funding is harder to secure, especially with patient count in decline. And competition from private practices is growing as subdivisions replace farms.

Yet even with all of these impacts, Clinica Adelante remains true to it’s mission:

“Adelante Healthcare continually seeks to improve the health of our communities by providing quality, comprehensive primary health care within each patient’s ability to pay.”

However, in order to continue to serve the underserved, Clinica Adelante needed to evolve, and innovate quickly, to attract privately-insured patients. In January we took their leadership through a branding program. We discussed their nine convenient locations, top-notch doctors, electronic health records initiative, etc.. These are all great features, and yet none of them are brand differentiators. So we dug deeper.

The key to their new brand is in celebrating the organization’s heritage of growing from the land, while making it relevant for the next 30 years. But being relevant wasn’t enough. Clinica Adelante challenged themselves to be leaders. We started by updating its name and organizational persona to reflect its new brand position: “Sustainable Healthcare.”

The original logo depicts the organization's heritage, while the new brand celebrates its relevance today.

Sustainable Healthcare

The “Sustainable Healthcare” platform isn’t just about going “green.” The brand position has three equally significant legs.

1. Sustaining the health of the individual patient: Sustaining individual health includes all of the above features, offering multi-disciplinary services, and becoming an online and offline resource for healthier lifestyles through diet, fitness and green living.
2. Sustaining the availability of health care for all: True to its mission, Adelante Healthcare will continue to serve the needs of all patients – regardless of their ability to pay – through central locations, convenient hours and a multi-cultural staff.
3. Sustaining the environmental health of the communities they serve: Adelante will become a leader in green clinic operations, educate on living healthier lifestyles, and promote environmental sustainability.

Another way to view Adelante’s position is: “Healthcare that is bigger than you are.” That’s a ubiquitous “you,” meaning that when anyone associates with Adelante as a privately insured patient, they are healing more than just themselves. They are helping others benefit from high quality healthcare, while also contributing to a community that strives to make the home, neighborhood, and planet a healthier place.

Adelante's new Sustainable Healthcare website

Operationally, becoming a model of sustainable healthcare is an ambitious goal. It doesn’t happen overnight. The goal is to have a definitive plan in place with measurable outcomes. Adelante is relying on organizations like the Teleosis Institute, Practice Greenhealth, and CleanMed for best practices in sustainable operations. They have also hired a new sustainability professional to enact change throughout the entire organization for waste reduction and recycling, energy efficiency, organic cleaning and maintenance, and green building materials for expansion and renovations. Adelante recently moved into its first LEED certifiied clinic in Buckey, AZ, with more to come.

Avein Saaty-Tafoya, MBA, HCM, is CEO of Adelante Healthcare. She said one of the challenges in their evolution was defining what “Sustainable healthcare” means.

“Our greatest obstacle was clarity. There were many assumptions about our new brand given the new focus on sustainability, as well as all the activity outside our industry in the green movement. Park&Co helped make this brand identity relatable and easy to understand.”

Here’s what Avein had to say about the opportunities the new brand position presents.

“It honors our mission, which is grounded in continuing the provision of health services whether a patient is insured or loses their coverage. It touts our business model, which as a non-profit community based collaborative must drive revenue and cover expenses, while at the same time increase efficiency and contain costs. We are exceeding expectations when it comes to quality and financial metrics. We are becoming a state and national model because of innovative programs like our collaboration with the Farmers Market Association at our centers. This partnership helps our patients gain access to affordable and healthful organic produce. Simple initiatives like this one have made a positive impact on our staff, patients, and the communities we serve.”

By helping Adelante healthcare share its mission of sustainability with a broader audience, we helped it secure its own sustainability as a business and a brand. We’re proud to be part of their innovative evolution to thrive in the next three decades and beyond.

As many of you probably know that Rose Bowl show was noteworthy for a few reasons. First, 100,000 people occupied the stadium making it one of the largest concert events in the history of California. Also, U2 used the performance to record their latest concert DVD and they streamed the concert live via YouTube. The statistics that followed the live broadcast were staggering. Ten million streams from 188 countries across the world made this the largest streaming event in YouTube’s history.

A friend who knew I would be attending the Rose Bowl concert sent me the following email before the show, “Aren’t you a sucker? Now, I can have the same experience free while still laying on my sofa.” In a sense he has a point. Thanks to social media he saw the same show, but he hardly had the same experience. Not even close. And this is as big a commentary on the effectiveness of social media vs. in-person Word of Mouth as there ever was.

What I experienced in the span of a week led to countless stories and memories that I’ll cherish and share for a lifetime. It was by definition the ultimate Word of Mouth experience. He didn’t experience the camaraderie that comes with spending an entire day in the General Admission line and the subsequent loss of humanity in the stampede that follows when the gates finally open. He didn’t experience haggling and begging our way back to the Vegas strip among 20,000 other stranded cab seekers. And of course, he didn’t experience the magic that is a live U2 event.

He may have been comfortable and it certainly was free to watch the Rose Bowl show on his laptop. But as I was there smashed between fans from London on my left, Hawaii on my right and Canada to my back, I was part of something bigger. I was part of something 100,000 strong in fact. A community of passionate people that if only for three hours of our lives were connected to each other. Social media is great. It has the ability to extend real life situations, but make no mistake, it will never replace those situations and experiences.

My friend may have sung along to “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” from the comfort of his own couch, but I sang the same song at the top of my lungs with 100,000 others. And as I glanced around and the band fell silent it was clear that we shared something too. An overwhelming moment that only those within those walls can truly remember. I will never forget the looks on the faces of the people surrounding me. Those looks can never be defined by any social media application. Once again, U2 taught me a lesson, and once again, I’m better for it.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.