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A couple weeks ago I had the chance to share some thoughts at the Snow Operating user group around the growth of skiing. I love these opportunities to explore growing skiing with a blank slate but as I prepared my talk I realized something ironic is this approach.

It’s not how I actually solve marketing ideas.

Instead, recognizing I have limited creativity, I spend a lot of time understanding my problem, my constraints, my resources, my skills, and my weaknesses to try to find a smaller idea or theme. Then, I focus all of that limited creativity onto that smaller area. In my experience this has been a much more successful way to actually make progress and solve meaningful problems instead of getting trapped in yet another fun, but often ineffective, brainstorming session.

Opportunities for Growth

So that’s exactly what I did with growing skiing. Specifically, I looked at the marketing challenges of this goal. For example, I kept hitting on a few big hurdles:

• Because non-skiers have no relationship with our sport or brands, messages from our sport to non-skiers are essentially like cold emails
• Because non-skiers are not in our databases, we lose the most effective channels and data-driven targeting methods to reach them
• Because we don’t have data about non-skiers on an individual level, we’re forced to sell them skiing using a generic message instead of one tailored to them and their motivators

In other words, all of the marketing strategies we rely on to sell skiing to existing skiers simply don’t translate to selling to non-skiers. The question I kept finding myself asking as I chewed on these challenges was simple:

If we don’t have a trusted relationship with these people, if we don’t know who they are, if we don’t have insights into who might be interested in skiing and why…who would know have have these things?

The answer, again and again, was equally simple: their friends and family who happen to be skiers.

Activating Skiers

Recognizing that word of mouth is a great way to spread your message is nothing new – remember Bring a Friend? – but one of the other big lessons I’ve learned in my career that sometimes the best ideas or not new ideas, they’re simply a recognition that you’re not yet fulling tapping the potential within a current idea that’s working really well.

I think you’d agree that right now our industry has not fully extracted the potential from the idea of skiers acting as salespeople for our sport.

So with this much narrower concept on which to focus my limited creativity, that’s exactly what I did. Here are a few of the ideas that came to mind.

1) Buddy Tickets for Beginners

We already have buddy tickets for traditional lift tickets and we already know that these work at getting skiers to tell their friends to ski at your resort. It’s why so many passes include this benefit and skiers use them even though it’s primarily a benefit to the resort. What if we take that same concept, find a beginner product that fits, and include “Buddy Tickets for Beginners” as a season pass perk to plan the seed in passholders’ minds that they have something to offer their friends who don’t ski.

2) Printed Perks

Second, we also know that a printed perk is more likely to get noticed, saved, and acted on. Instead of sitting in some random web page, these perks sit on their counter, fridge, or desk. So maybe we do what Wild Mountain did last year and print those perks so we can mail them with passes or hand them out at pickup (the full package is shown at the top of this post).

3) Rewards for Use

We’ve asked skiers many times to tell their friends, but we aren’t so good at rewarding those skiers when they do. Since the Bring a Friend concept was retired, a lot of great tactics and technology have come around that might fit. Take, for example, how Eldora used swag as a carrot to encourage skiers to keep skiing through the end of the season. Email automation kept potential rewards top of mind for passholders so they were always moving toward the next level.

Again, we know these concepts and technology work. So could do the same with this concept by offering perks each time a passholder gives a non-skier friend a Buddy Pass for Beginners. Maybe after one they get a $25 dining credit, three earns them a hoodie, and five unlocks the chance to participate in bonus days like Jackson Hole does for folks who ski 100 days.

Focus Your Brainstorming

This post isn’t to say that this is exactly how we should activate passholders and try to turn more of them into an army of sales people for our sport, but it does highlight the potential of focusing our collective creativity on one specific idea.

Give it a go either individually or with your team. How would you get more passholders to find their friends who may be interested in skiing and get them on the slopes? Or when you look at the problem of growing skiing do the constraints and challenges highlight a different theme or concept you feel we should focus some of that energy on?

Either way, I’d love to hear.

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.