You are not the audience
The feedback could be because it reminds you of your kid's dog, or of a bloke you couldn't stand at your last job. That reaction is real, and you can't help having it. But nobody out there, in the real world, cares what it reminds you of. (This is particularly true when naming a product.)
It isn't information. It's a coincidence that happened inside your own head. And, left unexamined, it's about to get expensive.
Whether you like it was never the question. The question is whether it works on the people you're trying to reach, whether it does the job the brief set, and whether it still sounds like your brand.
Psychologists call this the false consensus effect: you assume your preferences are the same as your customer's. Marketers are spectacularly affected by it. Research in the Journal of Marketing Research ran six studies across 714 marketing executives and found that when they weren't sure what customers wanted, they quietly substituted their own taste. In the first of those six studies, 86.6% of the 100 executives involved admitted they'd done exactly that, recently.
Eighty-six per cent. These are people whose entire job is telling the difference between their taste and their strategy. If they can't do it reliably, the rest of us have no chance without something to check ourselves against.
Being in the target market doesn't get you out of it either. You've seen the work a dozen times, and you know the strategy behind it. Your customer gets half a second on a phone while the kettle boils.
"I like" is the most expensive thing you can say
The problem isn't that you want to change the colour. It's why you want to change it. If you're only changing it on a whim, it can seriously affect every other decision for absolutely no reason.
If your feedback is just a preference, the work stops being tied to a brief. It stops being impartial, something people can judge, and starts being something people have to get past you. Your team stop asking whether it's right for the customers and start asking whether you like it. Different job, blander work.
There's proper evidence for this. Kluger and DeNisi's meta-analysis went back through decades of studies and found that although feedback helped performance on average, more than a third of that feedback made performance worse. Feedback works when it points at the task. It backfires when it's tied to personal taste.
"I don't like it" points at nothing except you.
I've watched this happen to good teams. Someone arrives with strong opinions and a portfolio to back them up, and within six months they're presenting three options where two are filler, and one is the one they reckon you'll go for. They haven't got lazy. They've read the signals and responded rationally, which is what capable people do.
It compounds from there. Psychological safety, the sense that you can speak up without it costing you, is the biggest single predictor of team performance. That comes from Amy Edmondson's research, the same body of work Google's Project Aristotle later confirmed inside their own teams. A team that won't disagree with you will let you walk into a bad decision, politely, without saying a word.
The thing that gets overruled is the thing that works
NCSolutions looked at nearly 450 campaigns and worked out how much extra each one sold, above what would have sold anyway. Then they broke that extra down: how much came from the media spend, how much from targeting, and how much from the ad itself. The ad itself, the actual creative, was responsible for about half of it, 49%. When Advertiser Perceptions asked 122 marketers and 184 media agencies to guess that figure, they landed on 19%.
It's a big gap. And it means that the creative is worth far more than you'd imagine. If you think the creative is worth a fifth of the result, softening it by a shade or two in review feels harmless. If you knew it was worth half, you'd treat every "can we make it pop" a lot more carefully.
So the cycle repeats. You paid for the first version. You paid for the beige one. You'll pay a third time when the beige one underperforms, and somebody starts using the word "rebrand".
Campaigns don't usually die from one terrible decision. They get nibbled to death.
Five questions before you give the note
- What did the brief ask this to do, and does it do it?
- Who's it for, and what do we actually know about them?
- Would someone who's never heard of us get it?
- Does this sound like us, or like anybody?
- Am I worried about the work, or about how the work makes me look?
An objection that survives all five isn't an opinion any more. That's a professional point, and you should make it.
So what should you say, instead?
"This [thing] works (or doesn't work) because [reason tied to the brief, the audience, or your brand]."
"This" keeps the conversation on the work rather than on whether someone's good at their job, which is exactly the distinction the feedback research turns on. "Works" drags a standard back into the room. Works for whom, against what? You can't answer without going back to the brief, the document everybody signed, and nobody has opened since.
"Because" is the killer. It makes you produce a reason, and if you get halfway through the sentence and find you haven't got one, you've caught yourself in time. You had a reaction, not feedback. Reactions are allowed. They just don't get to redesign anything.
So instead of "I don't really like purple", try: "Moving our brand colour to a deep purple works because we're going after a more aspirational customer, and purple carries associations with status and quality that our current blue doesn't."
The second one can be argued with. Your designer can come back at you with evidence, and between you, you'll get to a better answer. The first can only be obeyed.
Have taste. Just show your working
None of this means sitting there quietly while an agency does whatever it fancies. You know your business better than anyone in that room; you're the one carrying the risk, and nine times out of ten there's a decent reason buried underneath "I'm not sure about the purple". That reason is usually worth having. It's the note that needs the extra few seconds, not you.
So dig it out before you say it. Attach it to the brief, the audience, or your brand, and you've handed your team something to build with. Leave it sitting there as a preference, and all you've done is set capable people guessing.
Because whatever else is true, your customer doesn't know Harry, and has no interest whatsoever in what Harry likes.
If this sounds like your business
We see it constantly, and it's one of the main reasons campaigns miss. The strategy's fine, the team's good, the budget's there, and somewhere in the review process the brief quietly got swapped for somebody's personal taste. Nobody notices it happening, which is exactly why it keeps happening.
