This week I’ll be on my first week-long vacation in…well, I honestly can’t remember the last one I took. Among other things, I hope to spend some time on one of my favorite activities: finding lost ski areas. I absolutely love ski history, and with that topic on the brain, I thought I’d take this week to look back at some old-school marketing and see what we learn.

Let me walk you through my mental flow when I see a snow report for a mountain I’m planning to ride that day. Typically it goes something like this.

“Okay 10 inches, so probably more like 6 around most of mountain, maybe 4 at the bottom. If I hit the ____ trees maybe there will be a bit left over from the last storm that will make it feel more like 10. Of course, that saddle sometimes get some wind blown stuff and it might be closer to 10 up there…”

In other words, I rarely trust a snow report because the experience of having my expectations met is rare. And this is nothing new, just take a look at this print ad from Mt Abram in 1985.

And the fact that they added it as a selling point to their ad tells me the issue had been around much longer than that and was already widespread.

The Lesson
The lesson is simply this: skiers don’t trust snow reports. “Duh, Gregg, now shut up already…I’ve got my Twitter feed to check too this morning.” Yes, but the question is, who is going to find an innovative way to get that trust back?

We’re better content creators than we may have ever been, yet skiers don’t trust the first piece of content we publish every day.

Naivete
Call me naive, but if my phone alone has enough technology to take my pulse by putting my fingertip on the camera, something tells me we can drum up some uber-creative way to get ski reporting on a more accurate, transparent plane.

The question now is, who is going to do it or will it stay as is forever?

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.