I’m tired of seeing the ski industry try to sell itself using happy family photos and meaningless mountain scenics. Safe and sanitized family skiing is a bogus notion, valueless for marketing purposes. Any parent with sense understands instinctively that once you teach a kid to ski, he’s likely to disappear into the woods with a pack of extreme-skiing friends, re-emerging only to ask for the car keys or bail money. Warren Miller remarked some years ago that your kids will ski at your level for exactly one week, after which they’ll never ski with you again. He hit the nail on the head. The family that skis together won’t do so for long. Smart parents know that a skiing child might become an Aspen bartender instead of a Yale graduate.
In fact, the only reason anyone over the age of twelve ever starts to ski is sex. During the high school and college years, when we collect our best customers, consumption is driven not by disposable income but by hormones. The boom years in skiing occurred when growing companies sponsored wet tee-shirt contests, and when we “matured” into responsible executives, the boom ended. No sex, no sales. The only segment of the sport that is growing is snowboarding, and according to my sources, the shred-heads are the only folks in the business who still make sex an important part of the daily schedule.
I don’t have any market research to back up these conclusions, just a lot of anecdotal evidence. My wife, the wholesome mother of my child, fondly recalls holding car washes to raise money for unchaperoned ninth-grade ski trips, during which high school kids chased one another around the mountain and through the motel rooms all weekend long. Respectable ski industry elders tend to giggle and leer when asked about the early overnight ski trains to Vermont and Quebec. My own first ski trips involved a lot of searching for privacy within the crowded warrens of ski dorms. Fill in your own stories.
The point is this: ski marketing material contains entirely too many Brady Bunch families and not nearly enough Lycra. Without being sexist, we ought to be selling romance, great legs (male and female), hot tubs, escape from college or career doldrums, and hot singles “encounters.” Skiing should be a staple in Cosmo and Playboy.
The baby boomlet, or boom echo, means that over the next decade a sizeable cohort will storm through the American school system. Educators and textbook publishers are girding for the onslaught. The ski business should get ready now to steer a new generation of horny adolescents toward the mountains. The kids are out there, and there’s only one proven way to turn them on.
