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After the last couple of interviews I’ve published with Michael Reuckert and Brandon von Guenthner I’ve taken a few minutes the following day to share some of my thoughts and takeaways from the insights they shared. Yesterday’s chat with Troy Hawks about Red Lodge Mountain’s rebrand got a lot of wheels turning, so I wanted to do the same.

One of my questions to Troy was a little tongue-in-cheek, but not too far for the truth at times.

“There will never be a logo redesign that doesn’t come with a vocal group of skiers who are confident your marketing team are the possibly the worst humans ever to walk the earth. What was your philosophy or process for dealing with the haters?”

Very much to Troy and his team’s credit, they did A LOT to check their pride at the door and be open to feedback and other perspectives and the potential flaws in this thing they’d painstakingly created. His list included:

• Members of the local tribe
• Other resort marketers who have done similar
• College professors with unique insights

You have to draw the line somewhere at various stages of your design. A smaller group and you’ll move faster but have more blind spots. A larger group will move slower but might leave fewer stones unturned. Go too far without involving enough voices and you might have to walk something back. Not go far enough before bringing in more perspectives and you might not be getting feedback on something polished enough to actually help. Hopefully interviews like this (and a couple others I’m hoping to get about recent redesigns) will be a useful resource toward that end, but at the end of the day it’s good to remember one thing…

There’s no such thing as a perfect logo, there’s only your best effort.

Once you’ve done your best, there comes a point that Troy touched on when I asked him what he thought his team did well.

“Biting our tongue and getting it done. Initial feedback on the new logo among longer term employees was not positive, but we swallowed it back, and cranked out resort-wide signage in just two months ahead of the coming season.”

If you’re going to redesign your logo, what Troy is saying is that at some point you have to lock things up – imperfections and all – and move forward.

And I think he’s right.

I know folks will point to Cracker Barrel as the exception to what I’m about to say, but I think their story is just that – the exception. For the vast majority of resorts there will never be a need to revert to their old logo “…or else”. Instead, rolling out the result of all those months of work will be an exercise in trusting your best efforts, trusting your process, trusting yourself, and trusting that the storm will soon blow over like all logo storms seem to.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.