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Soccer games in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin were a big deal to me. Yeah, there was the game, but when you are eight years old… who cares. The real prize was the post game trip to Gillies, a 50’s era drive-in frozen custard stand that had three decades of charm built into its product. Just stepping into the parking lot made me feel like a greaser from The Outsiders.

It was hard to explain then, but Gillies had something special that made me look forward to the trip. The drive-in had an indelible retro presence interwoven through everything it delivered. Its funky roadside sign used a curly font reminiscent of Disney’s. The baby blue color scheme was deployed through everything from the tray liners to the uniforms. Even their fatty burgers and famous grasshopper milkshakes were products of a pre-South Beach diet menu scheme. Gillies may not have been aware of their brand or how people perceived them, but I think they had a hunch.

Snowshoe Mountain in West Virginia was in a similar situation. Our business had decades of history and shared experiences. We knew we had a special place in the hearts of our customers and a unique position in the marketplace. Yet, we couldn’t quite put our finger on it. An informal poll of our directors and managers showed us that our team had a disconnected view of our public image. Although our management team was aligned on many of our perceived strengths, a similar number of our managers believed Snowshoe was perceived far differently by the public. The perceived good and bad of our brand varied from manager to manager.

Though Snowshoe Mountain enjoys success, we believe the future growth of our resort is built on the idea of singularity. We want to strengthen the prospect that no other resort is like ours through the continued delivery of our core equities.


CLARIFYING THE BRAND

In the interest of refining the portrayal of Snowshoe Mountain’s image, our management team embarked on a brand communication program. We brought in Gregg Bagni, a brand and marketing consultant whose firm, Alien Truth Communications, works with organizations in the active outdoor lifestyle market. Bagni spent two days on site with our 16-person team helping us to explore, find agreement and document the heart and soul of our brand.

Our method of defining our brand, and communicating it to both our employees and market, took several steps.

First, we looked at the ambient surroundings, organic attributes and interactions that characterize a vacation at the resort. This helped us a find a set of words, our “brand words,” which simply define us and are easily recognizable in everything from consumer brochures to employee handbooks.

Second, we concisely defined the experience that our guests expect. We called it our “brand promise.”

Last, we outlined the inherent experiences and characteristics that make Snowshoe Mountain unique. These resort characteristics were the support to back up any claim we might make about our singularly unique experience.


SPREADING THE WORD

This exercise left us with a clear platform from which to communicate our brand. In the end, our goal was simple: take this renewed focus of our brand and drive it through all lines of business. Not only would the look and feel of our marketing change, but the brand had to be acted upon by everyone from lift operators to senior leaders. It had to penetrate the community, our products and partners. The brand would be used to evoke change in all business functions.

Outside of our two-day planning session, the implementation of our brand strategy was handled internally. There’s a perception that a program like this needs heavy doses of consultants and external management, but it doesn’t. Building belief around institutional programs can’t be driven through the organization with external counsel. Employees need to see resort leaders living it and acting upon the changes.

Most importantly, the resort needs an internal brand evangelist. As Snowshoe Mountain’s brand evangelist, I oversaw the rollout of the results from the envisioning work we had completed.

The first and most critical step was to debut our brand words and brand promise to our employees. We started by gathering a group of employees we called “connectors,” employees with long tenures and good reputations at the resort. We showed them the work we had done around our brand refinements, asked for their input, and then asked for their support.

Engaging those key influencers gave us a base of credibility to begin resort-wide meetings that demonstrated our brand. We proceeded to attend every division meeting and complete a short yet engaging 15-minute presentation on our work and results. Plus, every single new employee went through an orientation introducing them to the Snowshoe Mountain brand. In addition, our team created a “brand book” that outlines the history of the resort and what it has meant to our customers. The book depicts our brand and the details we want all of our employees to internalize. This was distributed to every employee.

To communicate our brand clearly, we created and used brand elements that reflect the rugged and wild nature of our image throughout our marketing. We subtly incorporated our brand words in our marketing copy and press releases.

Most importantly, we used renewed brand focus to make better decisions around our partners and products. We looked for resort partners who closely reflect a similar image and avoided those who do not. Our products, from lodging packages to dining options, were retooled to reflect the brand image associated with travel to West Virginia.


FAR-REACHING EFFECTS

Embarking on this endeavor was not a typical marketing campaign, searching for a measurable, short-term return on investment. It was an exercise to promote the health of the company’s image and make sure we attended to it.

The exciting part of the program is that we are seeing it work. Our employees, across all lines of business, are internalizing the messages that we have consistently communicated. Employees, with no guidance from their managers, are changing their e-mail signatures to display our brand words. The Food & Beverage department began offering venison chili to highlight a completely unique West Virginian cuisine. Even our newest après ski location, the Moonshine Watering Hole, has a clear connection to the region’s history. All this will reinforce our guests’ unique experiences.

A ski resort’s brand is difficult to explain, emotionally driven and highly intangible. We found that incorporating engaged employees into our brand planning process gave us the ability to deploy our brand communications on our own. We did all of this without complicated focus groups or customer surveys.

Today, I still think back to those times at Gillies. I can feel the brain-freeze from downing those grasshopper milkshakes and can still envision the baby blue road sign. I wonder if that same feeling of nostalgia will run through the children who visit Snowshoe Mountain today. I trust that as they grow older, the memories will fade, but something will stay with them. We expect these recollections to be composed of the inherent experiences of the resort, the look and feel, the heart and soul of decades of shared memories. This is what we’ve tried to capture and portray in our brand image, and what we believe will stay with our customers.

Brad Larsen, formerly director of marketing at Snowshoe, is now director of marketing and sales at Sugarloaf USA.



A LOOK AT THE SNOWSHOE BRAND
Snowshoe whittled down its concepts of what its brand means to a concise list of words, a simple statement, and supporting evidence, all designed to make it easy to communicate the essence of Snowshoe:

Brand Words
Escape
Wow
Wild
Unexpected Delight
Recommended
Real
Guide

Brand Promise
Get in your car and get up here. You’ll say what we say, “Wow!” Let us share our love of this place with you.

Brand Support
35 Years of Business
Unique Mountaintop Village
Unsurpassed Views
Genuine People
Pristine Location
One of the Largest Resorts in the East

ADVICE FROM A MARKETING GURU

6 Ways to Strengthen Your Brand Today

1. Have one main thought to communicate—the one thing you want customers to take away that will change their thinking or behavior and achieve your objectives.

2. Get creative with advertising and public relations. Always wrap your brand around “ideas that live in PR.”

3. Don’t follow the leader. When you do what the leader does, you help him. The category leader gets top of mind votes from consumers. If he zigs, then you zag.

4. Be culturally relevant. Make your brand part of your users’ pop culture. It’s the currency that will create the “suction” that pulls willing customers towards your brand.

5. Everything you do, anything that touches the consumer, is branding. Make sure your internal training/scripting efforts dovetail with and optimize your external messaging.

6. Practice and preach obsolescence. This sucks, because you have to change all the time. Things become obsolete only when better things are invented. Ideas are no different. Keep changing to create a higher standard.

Things To Think About In Tough Times

1. A recession is the best time to maintain or boost your marketing activity, especially as other competitors and brands dial down their messaging. There’s less clutter to break through.

2. If there was ever a time to get guerrilla, it’s now. Roll out a constant flow of promotions. That doesn’t mean giving up yield as much as keeping things interesting. Experiment, go overboard, have fun and be open.

3. Focus on existing customers, especially your online community.

4. Reinvigorate your ties with local clubs, groups, schools, parks and rec departments.

5. Don’t be afraid to transform your premium niche product into broader markets.

4 Places to Uncover the Hidden Gems of Your Brand Identity

1. Your Leadership Team and Employees. People support what they help create. Tap into them and listen. You’ll be surprised what you might learn.

2. Your Customers. Listen to what they say, either through formal research or your own intercepts with customers, whether yours or those of a competitor.

3. Your Competition. Don’t try and stand on the same spot they do. You’ll both implode.

4. Your Proprietary Assets. Figure out what you have that others don’t, and celebrate it.

—Gregg Bagni
—Alien Truth Communications