By Peter L. Getman
Principal Brand Director

You know the proverbial “let’s go back to the drawing board”?

After 22 years at MicroArts I feel my team is dialed into a creative process for brand design that delivers excitement and enticement around our brands. You’d hope so at least.

Recently, I sent four different brand design executions to my peeps for feedback. The executions were for a $15.5 million dollar sweet mountainside development brand called Mount Will located in Sunday River, Maine.

My feedback peeps included the CEO & Marketing Director of POC USA (the safest helmet in ski industry), the Marketing Director for Fisher skis, the VP Executive of Marketing for Sunday River, three true mavens in marketing land developments and my idols in the business, the leading PR guru in the outdoor industry, MicroArts Design Chief also a former Burton Art Director, a totally dialed NYC ad agency Chief, a marketing minded CEO, the marketing director for Sunday River Realty, the actual client … the developers, some ski buddies, and, of course, my ski bunny bride. All of which are core skiers or weekend warriors and theoretically prospective customers, ranging in age from 30 to 60 years old.

My outreach included a true crosscut of people we want this brand design to visually appeal to. Is this a tall order of demographics to entice with one brand design strategy? Yes, perhaps, but this is the trend as consumers become more complex and varied. See the 32 page white paper www.AdAge.com/2010America, which demonstrates the deluge of social media participation and shows that consumers do not fit squarely in one vertical market any longer.

Well the votes came in with no clear winner and no clear loser. There was some common feedback surrounding the executions, including a cool idea to combine two brand designs and a sweet idea to tweak a particular graphic design.

It was nearly a tie across the board, in both directions; many of the designs that people really liked, others did not.

So now what?

Too often, I’ve heard, “well of course that’s the feedback you got, you have too many cooks in the kitchen to gain brand design consensus”. I say BS to this mindset.

To me, I learned a ton from this feedback to guide in the next round of comps, including color preferences, headlines that do and do not resonate, me-too graphic imagery criticism and style preferences.

The biggest takeaway is that we missed the mark. Totally. The account manager tendency is to tweak the design with the feedback we received, but the reality is, there is no clear winner.

So call it a swing and a miss. I want to knock the cover off the ball!