I’m not sure when or where I first heard about placebos, but I can’t help but find the concept fascinating. You know, the placebo effect——when someone gets a fake drug, but they experience real healing.

If you are a parent, you’ve probably used a placebo on your children. Many times my child has skinned his knee and a river of tears has followed. Gently placing a bandage on the scrape made all the pain disappear. My child expected my care to make him feel better, and therefore it did: the placebo effect.

Placebos make depression fade and lower back pain vanish. They make wine taste better and bring value to brands. Placebos are the single most powerful tool marketers have in their arsenal.

There are ways to use placebos to create positive results at ski resorts. Though this idea may sound a bit nebulous, let me give you some more background on placebos, and we’ll get back to its correlation to ski marketing shortly.


PLACEBOS IN MEDICINE
The placebo effect has been recognized since the 1700s and has been studied in the medical field ever since. In medicine, it refers to the phenomenon in which people experience some type of benefit after the administration of a placebo, or a substance with no known medical effects (cornstarch, water, sugar pills). Simply put, a placebo is a fake treatment that creates a real response.

Placebos show us the power of the mind and the strength of expectation. Expectation is truly the key. When people expect a certain action will lead to a specific effect, many times that effect occurs.

Much research has been conducted on placebos. The best examples of their power are studies around anti-depressant drugs. Clinical studies have shown that anti-depressants effectively treat depression up to 70 percent of the time. Yet, anti-depressant placebos are effective in reducing depression up to 50 percent of the time. Time and time again, only a fraction of the benefit seen in patients is a direct result of medication itself.

Placebos work in the medical field for several reasons. One is that people enjoy the soothing touch of doctors and caregivers. Being under someone’s care helps them feel better. When you are sick, the chicken soup your mother serves is a placebo. Chicken soup doesn’t cure sickness, but people feel better under their mothers’ care.

The second reason is belief. People trust medical practitioners. If they give us a pill that they say will make us feel better, we’ll take it and, more times than not, we’ll experience a positive outcome regardless of what drug they prescribed.


PLACEBOS IN MARKETING
As marketers, we can use placebos to grow sales and improve guest experiences. Traditions and stories change the way people encounter things, and marketers tell stories, build rituals, and produce cues that can change the experience of a product or service. When marketers buy ads, create videos, or invest in media that changes the user’s expectations, they are investing in the creation of a placebo—“a measure designed merely to calm or please someone.”

The wine industry is expert in creating placebos. It has taught customers to expect that expensive wine tastes better than cheap wine. That fancy labeled wine in a bottle is better than that in a cardboard box. That wine with a cork is better than wine with a screw top. And, that wine served tableside by a sommelier is better than wine poured at a bar. Prices, packaging, and experiences are all placebos, and the wine industry has created expectations, told stories, and achieved belief in their claims.

There are great parallels between the wine and the ski industries. Wine has a few choices in color, a handful of packages, and a range of prices. But, when you look at the sea of choices at the liquor store, the wine experience appears fairly homogeneous to all but a knowledgeable few.

The ski business is much the same. We have a handful of snowmaking and lift manufacturers, a few groomer producers, and relatively narrow strata of price points. Sure, our individual mountains have unique topography, but remove the brand names and logos, and our industry is as homogenized as the wine aisle at Kroger.

So, here lies the challenge for a ski resort marketer: How do you build value, grow yield, increase visits, and support your brand? Simple. Use placebos.

Marketers can take this knowledge and use it to improve the real experiences of consumers by creating an environment of positive expectations. Here are three ways to get your resort tapping into the power of placebos.


KEY #1: FOCUS ON PACKAGING
Consumers are, for the most part, irrational. Most purchases are not based on true cost/benefit analysis. Decisions are based on emotion, and what people market to themselves. The placebo effect relies on a person’s perceptions rather than the quality of the product.

Gorgeous wrapping on a gift creates the expectation that the present inside is special. It invokes strong emotions. The wrapping is the placebo, and the assumption of the gift’s specialness is its effect.

In ski, we sell big-ticket products, like season passes and weeklong vacations. Having the “packaging” to match these expenses is critical. Too often, ski resorts have chintzy rack cards selling $5,000 vacations. Rack cards are good for selling pizzas, not vacations. Packaging matters.

When creating collateral, websites, and on-mountain signage, always consider what you are trying to convey. If you want customers to expect top-notch service, food or facilities, your packaging needs to match.

Guest service employees are a good example of those who need good packaging. We’ve all seen these front-line workers in faded vests and stretched-out t-shirts. But, not at Stowe, Vt. Behind a beautiful desk, you’ll find guest service employees “packaged” in expensive-looking Scandinavian sweaters. Expectation of great service rises when visitors see these well-outfitted employees. And I’d guess many customers walk away satisfied. The sweaters are the placebo.


KEY #2: TELL STORIES CUSTOMERS CAN OWN
Marketers can present rational information, but the placebo effect is based on irrational thinking. People don’t trust marketers or their measurable reasoning for purchasing. People trust themselves and their own beliefs, regardless of whether or not they are correct.

Too often, ski areas get involved in competing on number of lifts, snow totals, and acreage stats. But these rational metrics have become less and less persuasive. Resort marketers should instead focus on the emotional experiences of their mountain. Marketers should ask themselves, “What stories do I want my customers to tell themselves?”

Killington in Vermont wants its guests to feel like they ski the biggest, baddest resort in the East. The area calls itself the “Beast of the East” and makes operational decisions to reinforce that story. Killington opens in October and closes in June. Ninety-nine percent of its customers don’t ski in October or June, but it doesn’t matter. The customers tell themselves they are “beastly” due to their association to Killington.

Beaver Creek, Colo., works to provide a luxury experience. Luxury is about caregiving. Each afternoon, thousands of warm cookies are delivered to customers as they leave the slopes. Warm cookies invoke memories of what our mothers made for us. Mothers are caregivers, and the cookies are placebos.

Creating rituals and language are ways of coaching your customers what stories to tell themselves. It’s brand building, and it’s the creation of placebos.


KEY #3: BE A BOUTIQUE
In 2005, a study was conducted on the relationship between an energy drink’s effectiveness versus its price. One group was given an energy drink valued at $1.89 per can. Another was given the same energy drink, but told the can was purchased at a discounted rate of $.89. The groups were then asked to solve a series of word puzzles. As you may have guessed, the people who received the discounted energy drink solved fewer puzzles than the group with the full-price energy drink.

The experiment demonstrates that consumers believe that price reflects quality, and discounting creates a negative placebo effect. Discounting can trigger a belief that a product is inferior.

Many of us have heard that discounting devalues brands. That is true, and more specifically, it reduces the power of placebos.

There is a place for discounting, but use the tactic sparingly. Plenty of mom-and-pop hardware stores have gone out of business trying to compete against Walmart. Instead, these hardware stores should have worked to be boutique. They could have been the local experts that Walmart employees could never be.

Likewise, discounting in skiing has become easier than ever, with plenty of online and in-person discount channels. But, discounting weakens your placebo effect and brings your brand closer to a generic.

There’s no need to be the Walmart of skiing. Instead, consider being the cool boutique of skiing like Le Massif in Quebec. At Le Massif, you won’t find big online discounts, multi-resort affiliations, or slash-n-burn deals. Located on the St. Lawrence River, Le Massif operates a one-of-a-kind mountain. Its new hotel was built from an old barn in Baie-Saint Paul. The hotel, called La Ferme, is absolutely singular. Even travel to the mountain has been made exceptional, with a train that takes guests to and from the hotel. Le Massif thumbs its nose at the commoditization of skiing. Its storytelling is on point. And its placebo is powerful.


ETHICS
Several hundred years ago, marketers knew the power of placebos. Quacks traveled from town to town, selling magic pick-me-ups and cure-alls with no real benefits. This abuse of power led to the accreditation required in the medical field today, which builds trust in our doctors and caregivers. Unfortunately, people don’t have the same trust in salesfolks. Our profession has overpromised and underdelivered too many times. Placebos won’t shrink a tumor, make a blind man see, or help a paralyzed person walk, just like they won’t convince people that eastern Pennsylvania has deep snow, or Iowa tall mountains.

As marketers, we must find a middle ground of telling stories and building hype, and being able to achieve our promises with regularity. Saying you have “fast service” and then forcing people to wait in a long line destroys your placebo’s power. Yet, if you say your base lodge’s burger is made with “juicy, grass-fed beef,” and you deliver a burger that’s not half bad, your customers’ expectation will likely be met, and their experience will be positive.


PLACEBOS EVERYWHERE
The placebo effect is on display at your local grocery store. Each day, people pick up Heinz brand ketchup and compare it to a generic brand. They look the same, taste the same, and have identical ingredients. The generic brand costs less, yet many people choose Heinz, because strong brands are powerful placebos. Customers tell themselves a story when they buy that ketchup. They tell themselves that they care about their families and they value the perceived quality Heinz offers. They are experiencing the placebo effect.

Skiers make the same comparisons between resorts. Does this resort look and feel like it’s worth my time? What does this resort say about me? How will I feel about myself after I visit?

Placebos do best when they improve something that is difficult to measure objectively. The challenge is finding a superlative about which you can tell a story, then packaging it and selling it as if it were boutique.

The goal is to build an expectation around your product or service over time. When you deliver upon it routinely, your brand grows in strength. Your language, cues, and rituals will strengthen. Soon, your customers will come to anticipate your placebo and relish its effect. And that will keep them your customers.