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Inspiration
Ikon Pass’s unexpected appearance during this year’s U.S. Open.

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GREGG
BLANCHARD
   

There I was watching some U.S. Open coverage, enjoying the sadistic beauty that is Oakmont Country Club, when I saw a familiar logo. So familiar that at first it didn’t even register.

Seeing logos on professional golfers’ shirts, hats, and bags is nothing new. You’ve got the usual golf-centric suspects of Titleist and Taylor Made and Nike and you’re got the more generic business-angle brands of ADP and PayCom and Mastercard. Go a little further out and you’ll find random SaaS or CRM or investing apps.

But James Nicholas had a logo on his shirt that fit none of these categories and I wanted to confirm that my eyes weren’t playing tricks, so I headed to his Instagram, found a photo of when he qualified for the U.S. Open.

Sure enough, there it was.

photo of James when he qualified

See it? Let’s zoom in a little for those of you on mobile.

closeup of James with ikon pass logo

Yep, a golfer in the U.S. Open was sponsored by Ikon Pass.

Notice that i said James was qualifying for the tournament. He plays on the Korn Ferry tour (the tour below the PGA Tour) which means he’s not quite at the level where he’d get in from previous results at the tournament or other exemptions. Instead, he to play his way through the qualifying tournaments in order to earn a spot.

In other words, James isn’t the kind of golfer you’re going to see on national TV very often (or ever). Instead, the sponsorship is likely based primarily on a his 130,000+ Instagram followers and 384,000+ TikTok followers.

But even sponsorship alone is pretty clever because sponsoring an influencer is one thing, but getting a shirt sponsor with progressional golfer who is an influencer? That’s honestly pretty dang brilliant. Because golfers wear their sponsored gear nearly everywhere and in almost everything they post online. They don’t have to tag your brand or get folks to see the bio or do occasional sponsored posts, the logo shows up in virtually every video, every shot, and every story James posts.

Even in that screenshot above, see his latest video?

Yep, there’s the Ikon logo.

But sponsoring a professional golfer like James is also rolling the dice on ever broader, bigger coverage. Because there’s always a chance James could qualify for the U.S. Open, which he did…

…and be T6 after round one (which he was)…

…and make the cut (which he did)…

…and go viral for his breakdown of how much he made from the tournament (which he did).

And at every step of this journey? There was Ikon Pass, displayed prominently on his chest.

Golf and skiing aren’t perfectly parallel sports but they do have meaningful overlap in their Venn diagrams of participation. Maybe there’s a deeper reason for working with James, but even if there isn’t, the Ikon team played a really clever move with this sponsorship. Good stuff.


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.

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