Clearly Polished

By Tom Bagsarian

Tom Bagsarian Demonstration slabs were popular gathering spots at the International Concrete Polishing & Staining Conference.

Let’s turn back the calendar and revisit spring 1993. Bill Clinton had been the nation’s president for just a couple of months. Authorities were hunting the suspects who had detonated a truck bomb at the World Trade Center in New York City. Jurassic Park was playing in theaters. And the Chicago Bulls won their third consecutive NBA championship.

Also, something interesting was happening to people’s eating and drinking habits about this time. The California Milk Producers Board was suffering through another year of flagging milk sales. This was nothing new. Milk sales had been dropping for 15 years. In June 1993, the milk producers had had enough, so they hired San Francisco-based advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners to turn around their fortunes. Two words and a punctuation mark did it: “Got Milk?”

The result was “one of the most iconic sayings in the history of advertising,” says Robert Gomez Jr. Gomez wants to do for the polished concrete industry what “Got Milk?” did for the milk producers: Create a consistent, memorable image and tagline for the industry. Gomez believes the industry needs it. He says he visited about 100 construction and architecture websites and each had a separate story. That’s not very consistent.

Gomez presented his answer to this problem at the International Concrete Polishing & Staining Conference (ICPSC) in Duluth, Ga., last month. (Concrete Surfaces is the official publication of the annual event.) Specifically, Gomez presented his ideas at the ICPSC’s Concrete Polishing Global Leadership Summit, which was attended by many of the record 427 people at the conference.

Gomez said he had to learn much about polished concrete and he spent much of that day mingling with the contractors and exhibitors. “Some of the stuff you do is really cool,” he told the audience. “I own a Mini Cooper, and some of your machines are bigger than my car.” Perhaps, that’s a slight exaggeration, but he was clearly impressed by what he saw.

Gomez says the tagline should meet several criteria. It should be memorable, not include any generic words, reflect personality, include a graphical ID, be simple, and address the industry’s perception.

The tagline he came up with? Clearly Polished. To me it seems to do the trick and meets Gomez’s standards. I would be very interested to see which polishing contractor is the first to use it. If you do, please send a copy of your marketing material or your ad to me. For more on the event, visit www.icpsc365.com.

And finally, thanks to everyone at the ICPSC who watched us present the Concrete Surfaces Polished Concrete Awards, and especially to the winning polishing contractors who traveled to Georgia for the occasion. You can find all of the winners on pages 64–70.