As I’ve said many times, some of the most insightful lessons into marketing strategy I’ve ever learned is simply by learning to notice my own changes in behavior. It’s being able to stop, realizing a bit of marketing just influenced something I’d done, and then spending a minute backtracking to figure out why.

This is one of those.

Right now we’re seeing more resorts start their fall ticket sales. Some of those I’ve noticed because of the size of the discount, others because I consider myself a actual member of their market, but there’s one I noticed for neither of those reasons.

Three Elements

When Jackson Hole rolled out their ticket sale, they combined three elements. I’ll often seen one or two of these together, but rarely all in one package.

#1) A Number
First, they anchored the sale with a number. In this case, it’s 15%. Keep in mind that it’s not a huge number, but it is a number and numbers are concrete and easy to recall. This is the most common element I see with resort

#2) A Name
Second, they gave it a name; Early Bird Ticket Sale. It’s nothing special and in other cases those words are simply part of a sentence in the marketing copy used in and around the sale. But names are another thing that can help with recall.

#3) A Graphic
Third, they added something visual to hold these first two elements. While bordering on a logo, it’s simply a visual representation of the message with additional elements – the tram, the angle, the large lettering, etc. – that helps tie it back to the brand and create something that stands out.

And that ability to stand out against other elements is a key point.

For example, I first saw this in an email. It was the hero image and was only one of many items being featured in the body, but it’s the one thing I noticed as I skimmed the contents.

When I stopped by their website later, once again, this minor element competing against many other, sometimes larger elements was the one that my eyes went to first.

And when I clicked, the header image used this graphic once again to make it easy to recognize I was on the page where I was hoping to be.

Repetiton

But there’s one more layer to this strategy that’s really important to point out: repetition. Because what name and discount and graphic and name a did Jackson Hole use last year?

You guessed it.

All of this combines to take a very common, but easy to overlook thing – a fall ticket sale – and make it a little bit stickier, a little bit easier to remember, and, in turn, a little bit more likely to be acted on.

Nice work, Jackson Hole team.

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.