Before I describe our target audience I would like to describe our industry and its initial growth patterns. We will be distributing and installing an intelligent network of charging stations across Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Ontario CA. This is a brand new industry that aligns with the global automotive movement to introduce plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles over the coming years and work towards the administrations goals of 1,000,000 plug-in vehicles on the road by 2015. The deployment of these vehicles will be targeted at cities that are prepared for these vehicles, meaning they have the infrastructure (charging stations) installed already. These target cities usually have a plan or charter with a local utility company, government officials, consumer advocates, potential customers, and a technology partner. There are a few research organizations involved with this and a good example is “Project Get Ready” (www.projectgetready.com).
Our goal is to sell charging stations and in order to do that we need to help bring the utility companies, government, advocates and customers together to help spur the industry. For that reason we have a bit of a complex demographic. Here is my best effort to describe it:
• Vehicle customers: 20-35 year old, well educated, environmentally conscious, upper middle class
• Utility Companies: 40-60 year old, conservative industry, reluctant to change but eager to get involved with this movement as these vehicles offer an enormous new market for them in the near future. We want our corporate image to be a bit “Shocking”, but respectful to this audience.
• Government: 40-60 years old, similar demographic as the utility companies, but they tend to be a little more liberal in some communities. This is one of our target customers.
• Public business and Entrepreneurs: 30-45 year old, looking at our industry as a growth market and excited about its potential.
Our desired corporate image is an aggressive company in a controversial area so we need our marketing and image to be bold and something to remember. The term “Shocking” in our name has two meanings; the first is we are in the business of promoting electricity as a fuel of the future, the second is fact we are going to shock the industry and transform our transit system. We want to push the envelope as far as possible without offending the conservative side of the equation with utilities and government officials. We have an existing business and logo with Shocking Motors (www.shockingmotors.com) where we are going to focus our efforts on some plug-in vehicles and battery powered mass transit buses for cities, campuses and facilities such as airports. Even though we have an existing image, I want as many creative departures from this as possible as we are debating changing all of our corporate imaging and color structure.
Color Preferences
Like: White, Green, Blue, Orange, Red
Dislike: Purple, Grey
Our Ideas and Additional Information:
We are selling electricity so any theme around electricity or charging would be good. Open to other ideas though
Themes
Loud
Modern
Simple
Colorful
Necessity
Serious
Refined
Style
Pictorial Mark
Literal or representative imagery is used to symbolize the brand.
Abstract Mark
Abstract shapes and symbols convey an idea or feeling.
Famous Logos displayed under fair use to enrich the general publics' knowledge of graphic design.
Applications
Web
Print
Signs
Television
Clothing
Diamond Contest
We're sorry, but this contest is presently open to a limited pool of designers.
Thank you everyone for your entries so far. I ranked them this morning and wanted to add a few more comments. We like the green and black color combination the best so far in #12. Both the idea of the lightening bolt and the outlet work well and the logo concept with our name is starting to come together. There is a new standard outlet that will accompany these vehicles and a handled cord that I think could make sense with our logo. I am not sure if I can upload pictures here as an example, but I have included 2 links below that have a picture of the charging plug end. If you click on the picture of the charging station that says "ChargePoint" it will take you to a photo gallery with some better pictures of the connector.
We have extended our contest by 2 days as today is a holiday for some of us. There were a couple of designers that we are interested in that had obligations with family this weekend. We were unaware that our contest would end on a holiday when we schedule the end date. We also want to provide necessary feedback on your entries, and we will not be able to do that today. I apologize for the extension, but we did select the shortest extension so we could get this completed and select our winner. Thank you everyone for your submissions and your patients with this extension.
We want to thank everyone for their creative entries into our competition. We have tried to rank the designers who have concepts that we like in our top 12 without putting different versions of the same logo at the top. We are meeting today to review the concepts and give everyone a fair shot at this competition. The orders of our rankings below around 20 do not have as much thought in order, it gets too confusing as judges to rank one design version against another in a different campaign. Based on the rules and scoring for designers we thought this was a fair approach to try and at least "rank" each entry we liked so the designers could get their ranking credentials. Thank you everyone for a great experience.
Thank you to everyone for your entries. We did receive a lot of late entries and variations to concepts and we need to take time to evaluate them fairly. We will select our winner by Sunday at the latest as we have one team member who will not be back until Friday and would like to evaluate the final list.
