Let me kick this off with an interesting observation.

Every season I probably see thousands of messages related to lodging offers. I see 5 nights for the price of 4, 30% off, pre-season specials, and last-minute deals. But there’s only one of those thousands of campaigns I can actually remember.

That being Vail Resorts’ 96 hour sale.

Tick tick tick. It's the final hours of the #96HourSale! Save up to 45% off lodging:https://t.co/5P7mb8AhLq pic.twitter.com/i9GIk5AUoh

— Breckenridge Resort (@breckenridgemtn) February 27, 2016

A simple name and logo are more than enough to help a campaign (that may not save skiers more money than any other campaign) stand out from the rest.

To Name or Not to Name
I think naming things is a really interesting idea.

On the one hand, part of the challenge I first faced when I joined Inntopia was the fact that names had been created without a process or structure for just about everything – products, features, admin areas, integrations – and the resulting matrix was tough to keep in your head for a minute, let alone recall when it came time to look for a new booking system.

But my initial proposal was clearly too simple and missed using the power of names for critically important things.

So while you could clearly have too many names, too few was also a risk.

Campaign Names?
I could be wrong (I usually am – batting about .300 these days), but I think we’re erring on the side of too few names for our marketing efforts.

For example, resorts are starting to push a lot of winter-related products. There are been dozens of deals in my feeds every day for weeks. But just like the 96 Hour Sale I started with, only one has caught my attention. Only one has gotten me to click.

Brrrr. It's cold in here. There must be some cheap tix in the atmosphere.

Lift tickets starting at $29. Sale ends Friday, August 3 at 11:59PM: https://t.co/846zhSOXVU pic.twitter.com/30rnVinwtB

— Sunday River (@sundayriver) August 1, 2018

Once again a simple name and logo are more than enough to break through the clutter that surround virtually all marketing messages.

And once I clicked, a dedicated landing page with three lovely icons (more on that here) to capture a few key aspects of the sale.

If ski resorts named every sale and every offer we’d start to sound like a used car dealership. But we don’t.

So if there’s a key campaign you pin your numbers on each year that you really want your audience to grab hold of? Well, maybe a name for that is just what the doctor ordered.

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.