A couple weeks back I highlighted how Ragged Mountain, thanks to a cheap lawn ornament, had put together one of my favorite marketing campaigns. More than a few people shot me emails or mentioned they loved how the simplicity of that concept worked in a world of high-tech and big budgets. It is refreshing to see such a low-tech idea like that get such positive feedback and be so effective.

On that note, I started searching out more and more of these simple, inexpensive, yet effective marketing ideas that resorts use to improve the experience or bring skiers to the slopes. One such idea is found at Mount Snow, Vermont.

In 2004, Mount Snow hit the big 5-0 and celebrated a half-century of skiing and riding. To celebrate this gold anniversary, they came up with a simple idea that involved nothing more than some paint and a couple hours of work: turn each #50 chair gold. As I’m sure we’ve all noticed, ski chairs are numbered, and since Mount Snow has a handful of long lifts, this meant that 11-#50 chairs existed all over the mountain.

On the Mount Snow blog, GM Kelly Pawlak told a fun story of these chairs:

It always amazes me how much people love to ride our golden chairs – especially kids. I rode up with one young girl (we missed the golden chair – it was right in front of us) and she told me that if you ride the golden chair you can make a wish and it comes true.

The photo at the top of the post was taken by Matt Dunn and is one of a handful I found scattered across the web of random people getting stoked on the fact they got to ride one of the gold chairs.

Simple concept that helps make the skiing experience that much more fun. I’d love to see more ideas like this.

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.