I keep seeing this over and over again: some useful or funny piece of branded “stuff” that is given to resorts (or places your guests might be). A one time cost with long time branding and advertising benefits. Here are a few examples:

Monster Energy
Monster Energy’s giant rail features are hard to miss. The cost to build a rail isn’t much when compared to other ways of getting your logo on the mountain and there are dozens of resorts on a budget that would love a shiny new feature for their park.

Ride Snowboards
Here’s a funnier example that is more about making dump taking a bit more enjoyable. Love it.

Skullcandy
Similar to Monster Energy’s, especially because both are in the shape of a product. Even more affordable to build than the first rail example, I’ve seen pictures like this all over the web.

Milk
If the “Got Milk” campaign (that can’t even prove milk is actually good for you) can get posters like this into elementary school lunchrooms, something tells me we’ve got a case to get resort logos in a lot more places.

Are Resorts Taking Advantage?
I’ve seen some resort brandage off the mountain in some pretty clever places before, but if this were a head-to-head competition between gearmakers and mountains, I think the gear guys would be rocking it. So, how do you take advantage? Here are some lame ideas to spark some better ones in your own noggin’.

• Donate snowboard benches made from old rentals to local board shops with some nice topsheet work featuring your logo
• Give snow shovels to local businesses that say, “if there is enough snow to use this shovel, you shouldn’t be shoveling” with your logo
• Build a new box for a local skatepark with your logo painted on the sides
• Donate branded thermometers to gas stations to put on pumps or grocery stores to put in the freezer section

So, all humility aside, those ideas are pretty much golden-epic-gamechangers, but long story short, lots of companies are playing the donation + brand = free advertising game and winning. I’d love to see more resorts apply some creativity and do the same. If there are some others (resort or non-resort) I missed, send ’em over, I’d love to see.

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.