honoriartist

Last night at Mozart's I got Minked. A man sat in a corner of the coffee house with a little whiteboard that said free branding. Now in Texas that can mean anything, especially in Austin. It turned out the guy is a personal brand consultant and his company is Evolutions Consulting and Communications and he's a friend of the coffee roaster owner of Mozart's and he works with Continental Airlines and some other clients as a marketing consultant. I found a table nearby and worked a few productive hours on the introduction of my dissertation and was getting ready to go and I saw he was also getting ready to leave so I wandered over to him and curiously asked what he was doing. He asked me to sit down and told me that he could work with me if I wanted as a personal coach to work on my brand. So I told him that I was graduating this year and was going to attend the museums and the web conference and I wanted to brand myself as a mail art consultant to museums around the world. He brought out a blank piece of paper with a large circle filling up the whole middle space and the words "value wheel" at the top. He divided it into a pie chart and asked me about my values and I told him that I'd had classes with Oscar Mink and he said he'd audited some of Oscar's classes and what we continued to do through the whole hour plus of consulting was SO MINKIAN and wonderful. We placed my strengths and enthusiasms and accomplishments on the value wheel as successful embodiments of my values which if you want to know I'll read from the wheel: Communication, customer service - high level, team creativity, energy, new art form/opera, visionary, artist collaborator, team values (pull the values from team members) creativity, and Frank Lloyd Wright building ambiance. Whoooo nice values ay? So then I explained mail art and my dissertation and he explained that sitting in Mozart's one evening a week was like his art form and he also collects a little art from France. Then we discussed the nuts and bolts of what to put on my business card/give away at the Museums and the Web conference in the spring and he suggested that I give away postcard sized take-aways that had some of my art on them. I LOVE that idea, I make postcards all the time anyway, why not make original postcards? He said that would be an incredible value statement and then we worked on the informational side of the card and here's what we came up with for text: honoria madelyn starbuck
- Mail art consultant
- Art curriculum development
- Collaborative creativity
Then a section titled "Creative Accolades"
"impresaria" of first Internet opera
www.cyberopera.org
Electronic Museum of Mail Art
www.actlab.utexas.edu

and at the bottom in fine lettering line that says
"the reverse side is mail art by me" and the date.

I was really fussing about what kind of hand outs to take to the conference and this is the perfect thing! Now I have to figure out the layout of the back side and then I'll hire John to help with a letter. That whole consultation was free. Next I plan to collaborate on a great letter of introduction if his rates are within reach. I'm going to send him one of my cards right now as a thank you.