A few months ago my wife and I ended up watching a 3-part video about how Kodak makes film.

What can I say, sometimes we get a little crazy.

But there’s a fascinating lesson without our somewhat boring-sounding movie choices. Because throughout the series there were dozens of moments where a Kodak employee who had been doing the same thing for 20+ years would matter-of-factly state some part of the process and we would be absolutely blown away by the science and design and sophistication of what they were describing.

They had been doing it for so long they just had trouble seeing the magic. But for outsiders like us? You couldn’t miss it.

Lift Installs

Many of you have spent 10, 15, 25, or more seasons at a resort. You’ve seen snowmaking fire up, wire rope get spliced, and avalanche mitigation so many times it may have lost it’s magic.

But you aren’t your audience. So the trick for marketers and storytellers in our industry is to find ways to see our experience through the eyes of someone who doesn’t spend every day on the mountain – the eyes of someone who does see the magic – and then tell those stories.

Aspen’s Kyle Bruna did exactly that with a recent Instagram video.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Aspen Snowmass (@aspensnowmass)

You’ve watch the way lift install crews communciate, you know how precarious it can look when those towers are put in place, and you probably how know they release the cable from the load. But for everyone else? It’s mind blowing stuff to realize how the lifts someone has ridden hundreds of times were actually pieced together.

Just take a few of the comments as examples of that:

“Crazy to see what kind of work goes into this. Amazing!”

“That looks insane!!!”

“So that’s how they do it! Cool!!”

Were there a few people in the comments who already knew (roughly) how this worked? Sure, but for every one of them there were many who couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

Stories

This is also a perfect illustration of my definition of stories:

“Stories give moments meaning.”

As some point in the coming season just about every person who saw this video will look up at a tower, see the bolts connecting everything together that they’ve seen a hundred times, and have a simple moment of “Whoa” which will give that ride – and their relationship to the resort – a new layer of meaning.

Great work, Kyle.

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.