I’ve mentioned this before, but I wanted to highlight this campaign front and center.

We spend so much time talk about bringing people into our sport, into our culture, into our communities so they can experience what we experience. But, man, it can be sooooo incredibly hard for us to shrug off that curse of knowledge and see just how scary and intimidating both our activities and our culture can be to outsiders.

There are a handful of ways we’ve tried to tell stories to guide new people into our sphere, but one of the best is simply making them the characters in these stories.

Giving them someone that looks and acts like them to be inspired by.

A recent series from Blue Mountain called “Annie Tries” does this as simply and as effectively as I’ve ever seen. Take the video where Annie tries mountain biking, for example, a sport that’s much more intimidating that we often give it credit for (because it’s not intimidating to us).

Notice how Annie’s candor instantly brings the content to a level where virtually anyone who doesn’t mountain bike can relate to it. The, over the course a minute or two, they see her learn, conquer her fear, and start to enjoy this activity. To get a taste of the experience.

The same is true for the video where Annie tries the adventure park.

Her fear and honesty make it easy for anyone to relate to her. But then we also see her overcome those fears and experience that weird overlap where fear and fun mix, especially in hindsight.

We don’t have a lot of content like this for skiing, but you can imagine how it would go:

• A never ever takes us along on their first day
• We feel their fear as they try to make their first turn
• The anxiety is clear the first time loading the lift
• But then there’s a bit smile when it starts to click

The journey we are taking never-evers on is not just the experience, it’s the fears and worries and pain that come before the experience. Non-skiers probably get that skiing is fun, but we sometimes forget about the reasons that – even when presented with a fun activity – people aren’t doing something.

Those are the hurdles and Blue Mountain, with Annie’s help, is trying to overcome them as well as any resort.

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.