We are honored to have received the prestigious award of 2011 Best Company Culture IMPACT Award from the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce. The luncheon was an exciting event and Matthew Clyde, founder and chief strategist of Ideas Collide, accepted the award. Watch this video highlighting our agency that was shown at the awards ceremony and check out our Facebook page for photos from the event.

I recently came back to Ideas Collide after taking a five year hiatus to become a full time parent to two babies.  One of my biggest concerns was that, by being “out of the game” for so long, I would be ill-prepared to manage some of today’s breed of marketing projects.

So, I braced myself for some “trial by fire” moments.  However, after a few weeks on the job, I began noticing that, in many ways, my fulltime parenting “gig” had given me many opportunities to practice skills essential to any marketer.

Pitching ideas to a potential client is much easier if you have spent the last few years trying to find clever ways to sell everything from broccoli to weather-appropriate outfits to tantrum-prone toddlers.

Parallels are also easy to draw in brand management.  As we work on brand management for big clients, I have realized that much as it was when my babies turned into more independent toddlers, the more massive (bigger) a brand, the harder it is to “control or buckle it”.  A brand’s exposure to the world increases the bigger it gets. Restricting or containing it is not only unadvisable, but really impossible.  Being nimble, alert and one-step-ahead is the strategy I used as a parent, and it’s certainly the strategy called for when working on these projects.

It was not long after starting that I realized the persuasion and story-telling techniques I had honed as a parent had given me valuable schooling for my job as a marketer. Now, if only I would have thought of using Power Point to present to my husband options for birthday venues …

For over two decades, the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce has been recognizing enterprising Valley entrepreneurs and their businesses with its IMPACT Business of the Year Award.  In March, Ideas Collide was selected as one of this year’s 10 finalists.  We are very proud of this accomplishment and honored to be in a league of nine other dynamic and excelling companies in the Valley. We are proud to be recognized for our work and commitment to the community over the past 6 years, and are looking forward to the IMPACT Award Luncheon on May 19^th. You can see us featured on the homepage of the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce’s website at http://phoenixchamber.com

Early this year Best Western launched a new brand Descriptor Program, as well as a new brand tagline:  “The World’s Biggest Hotel Family^SM”. ICMC was tasked with redesigning Best Western’s Travel Card to incorporate this new tagline and draw upon it for inspiration. The new Travel Card incorporated famous landmarks to connect the consumer to “The World’s Biggest Hotel Family^SM” tagline, but still allowing them the opportunity to discover meaning behind the creative.