Why a Marketer Like Myself Has a Picture of Larry Bird at His Desk

When i was young I played a lot of basketball. When we moved to a new house that had a gravel driveway, a hoop went up long before the surface was ever paved. If you want to learn ball-handling, dribble on rocks for a few months. Though I loved the sport, I often felt like [...]

The Hidden Family Cost That’s Competing for Skiers’ Annual Dollars

Call it coincidence, call it something else, I had a strange realization as I bounced between two feeds during the recent NSAA conference. On the one hand, I was reading a story about Paul Miller, a tech writer who spent a full year without the internet. As I finished reading one section of his story, [...]

Looking for the shortcut to really bad marketing? Do this.

I sat at my desk, alone. It was 9:30am. Wandering through the cluttered refrigerator of thought, I artfully dodged rogue tweets vainly attempting to derail my near perfect mental state. In an instant, however, the fact I had long feared quickly hedged my journey: I didn’t have anything to write about for next Thursday’s post. [...]

Don’t Forget, Resort Marketing isn’t Just Selling…It’s Teaching.

Today I want to take a break from analysis and share a simple idea that’s often come to the rescue in my marketing. When I finished my degree in marketing, most of my peers who went to grad school chose the classic, the prestigious, the typical, MBA. I took a different route. Recognizing my strength [...]

Step Aside “Office”, Park City’s “Ski Resort Marketing 101″ May Go Primetime

It’s one thing to have a funny idea. It’s another to execute. Just the other day, in fact, I started writing a “humorous” (in quotes because that was the intention, not the outcome) about an imaginary resort marketing director who was fired for not knowing Objective C and Java (poking fun at how the skills [...]

Is SMS Marketing Dead in the Water for Ski Resorts?

Meeting someone who doesn’t text is often like meeting someone who isn’t on social media (though I find they are often the same people). While they exist, they are rare. My parents even shoot me a text every few weeks, approximately the same amount of time it takes them to produce each message. With adoption [...]

Can You Safely Sell Your Resort’s Secret Pow Stashes?

I’ve had this question before: what happens when you expose those “top secret” pow stashes as a product or promotional piece? Do you piss off locals? Do you make more sales? Both? Round 1 I first took a look at this idea in 2011 with Heavenly’s “Tahoe Stash” promotion. On the surface, it appeared the [...]

Maybe Passionate Skiers Aren’t What Your Resort Marketing Team Needs After All

Adam Hawes is smart. How smart is he? Well, this is what happens to website traffic when I post his words instead of mine: Dipping from his stream of wisdom, we see a few common threads, all surrounding the use of the word, “passion”. “Generally speaking, the action sports industry has stayed well ahead of [...]