Park City boosts lodge upgrade marketing with clever collaboration.
Gregg Blanchard /
I’ve often said that virtually every resort investment is a story that needs some amount of marketing resources to tell. Whether it’s a new snowmaking pond or paving the parking lot, there is a ton of untapped marketing value in most every upgrade.
Sometimes it’s a little. Sometimes it’s a lot.
But the trick is to look for it because, every once in a while, you find a little vein of marketing gold.
Park City had one of those situations when their mid-mountain lodge, Summit House, needed an design upgrade. Now, modernizing the interior of a lodge isn’t a bad story, but it probably doesn’t stand out as an one that is deserving of much more than a sprinkling of time and attention to let your audience know about the whats and whys.
But someone on Park City’s team knew something about the mountain others didn’t: it’s where HGTV interior designer Jasmine Roth was married.
So instead of hiring a designer and then telling the story, they hired Jasmine. And, with that move, hired a designer who came with a) a great story, b) a team that could tell that story really well, and c) a ton of distribution and reach for that story once told (Jasmine has 700k followers, HGTV 5m, plus streaming viewership).
Listen, I won’t pretend the know the logistics of how the arrangements of this kind of collaboration works, but I love that the Park City was able to connect these dots and unlock a deeper story from an upgrade that their team otherwise would have glossed over.
Should every lodge upgrade become a partnership with HGTV?
Probably not.
But I think the lesson here is to not assume that the story is only the improvement. Look for ways to go a little deeper, unlock more at the human level through people whose lives somehow connect to that part of your mountain, and try to generate a little bit more meaning for every upgrade, every improvement, and every story along the way.