Vintage Ski Ads Show How Little Resort Marketing Has Changed

 
I’m a sucker for ski history, but sometimes it’s easy to look at all the technology, the improvements in ski engineering, the web, and think that those improvements apply to marketing as well. During a recently perusal of New England Ski History’s extensive vintage ad collection, I was once again reminded that the medium for delivery may change, but the tactics are nothing new. Resort marketers have been using the same selling points & taglines for years.

Kinda fun to look back. Here are a few examples.

Student Rep Program
Killington has been running one of these for a few years now:
http://www.killington.com/winter/plan/tickets_and_cards/college_pass/college_rep
(Crotched ad from 1983)

Spring Season pass
If skiers didn’t but a full pass, try to snag them later in the season with a Spring Pass. Mt Hood has one, as do many, many other resorts:
http://www.skihood.com/Store/Products/Season-Passes/Individual-Passes/Spring-Pass
(Squaw Mountain ad from 1971)

Ski Multiple Mountains on One Ticket
Sound familiar? This tagline has been used for Snowbird/Alta, Brighton/Solitude, Aspen/Snowmass, the EpicPass and more. Here’s a link to one example:
http://www.snow.com/epic-pass.aspx
(ad from 1963)

(Waterville Valley ad from 1967)

Biggest Resort in the World / State / East
The line between one resort being bigger than another is starting to blur, but it’s still a commonly used tagline on national, regional, and even state levels like Bretton Wood’s shows:
http://brettonwoods.com/winter_sports/alpine/overview
(Mount Snow ad from 1961)

(Jiminy Peak ad from 1971)

Buy Two – Get Three
I don’t think I need to provide an example of this one because it is so common: buy X days, get X+1 days or multi-day packages.
(Saddleback ad from 1983)

The Simple Things
Reminded me of a post I did recently about embracing what you aren’t:
http://www.slopefillers.com/if-i-were-a-small-mon-n-pop-resort-id-embrace-it/
(Burke ad from 1983)