New TaylorMade CEO Ben Sharpe: "People want us to be the renegade"

GD: Is part of that enthusiasm driven by your stated goals of managing inventories and less cascading down of prices?

Sharpe: They want us to lead that charge, but in a responsible way. Still, talk is cheap and you get judged by what you do, not by what you say. All I ask is that we get judged by what we do. We want to address the challenges, but also introduce product in a cool way. Something that hits a nerve with every golfer -- like what we did with the introduction of the RSi irons -- where the golfer says, "Yeah, that could be for me."

GD: What's the path to do that?

Sharpe: Getting back to who we are: cool, exciting and [with] technologies that are better than their predecessors. And the marketing campaigns that are around those really need to strike to the core of the golfer. That's what it is all about and maybe, over the last 18 months, we got a little bit away from who we are. Sometimes I think we got a little bit carried away with our messaging. But I think what you saw with RSi and what you'll see with R15 and AeroBurner is that we're right on point.

GD:Is the average consumer confused? Bored? Angry? Eager?

Sharpe: If you listen to the people on the blog sites I'd say they are angry. But if you listen to the golfers out there -- because a lot of people who are on the blog sites are our competitors -- I would say there is some confusion. What product is the best one for me? Why is this one better? And why does this one cost this much and why does the other one cost that much? That's not an angry emotion. They're just a little confused.

I disagree. TaylorMade's line of clubs last years was very muddled. They erred when they didn't realize what they had with the original SLDR, the JetSpeed was a poor follow-up to the RocketBallz, and the SLDR-S didn't do a very good job of distinguishing itself from either the SLDR or the RocketBallz. Their pricing structure didn't make much sense, and everything was grey and blue (literally).