At the 1996 NSAA Summit at Charleston, S.C., we eased into a loose consensus: a desire to do something and reinvigorate. This was later defined by a post-summit think tank last July as finding ways to effectively target the 12 to 24-year-olds. NSAA staff was given the task of doing the required research and developing a blueprint.
Since then, NSAA president, Michael Berry, has been trying to get his arms around the challenge. By his own admission, it has not been—and isn’t now—as straightforward as he had hoped. There is nothing straightforward about today’s youth market. While the physiological and hormonal factors may be unchanging over generations, the media influences are anything but unchanging. So is the market that results, and therein lie the problems. Or opportunities.
Background
The deliberate journey that brought us all to this point started a number of years ago when it became clear to everyone that, for whatever reasons, the market was flat. Skier visit totals were flat and, without snowboarding, were declining; unit sales of ski equipment were actually declining.
Expert help was sought—Glendinning, The Brand Group and, in 1988, McKinsey & Co. was retained to devise a blueprint for action. “Tap into the 35 million Americans whose demographic profiles made them potential skiers” was the core strategy. Implementation involved raising an industry-wide war chest to enable a media-based, consciousness-raising effort that would promote trial of the sport.
For a lot of reasons—insufficient funding, flawed research, complications of merger, recession, poor staffing—the effort never really got airborne. But in retrospect, many point to the lack of focus in targeting. The TV images produced by the DDB Needham agency included the token kid, the token senior, the token black, the token handicapped, the token cross-country skier. In trying to speak to everyone, it spoke to no one.
This time around, everyone is determined to avoid the errors of the past. There will be a targeted national advertising component, no grandiose campaign. There will be central command for executing the programs, but with regional sensitivity. There will be no dysfunctional, massive war chest, lacking depth and breadth of industry support.
The NSAA board and Berry are aiming at a program of research, ideas, approaches, messages—a sort of pool of marketing DNA that the industry can use in pursuit of the youth market. Individual areas, groups of areas, regional associations could reach into this pool and develop their own programs.
Indeed, de facto this is already happening. The American Skiing Co. wasted no time in launching some high-profile, partnered promotions at the youth market. They also published a magazine, Sno, for this market. And at Times Mirror Magazines, the Skiing Company launched freeze, aimed at this same market. (See review, page 28.)
NSAA’s Youth Market Research—The Culture
Michael Berry and NSAA’s marketing specialist, Mike McMenamy, have been seeing a number of firms that specialize in the youth market and its culture—a journey that has taken them to all parts of the country, as it had to, because there is no one national youth culture. What’s cool and what isn’t—to say nothing of the vocabulary used to describe it—can change in a matter of a few miles. Among the findings:
- Trends and fashions now tend to “bubble up” from the street-smart urban kids, reaching out to the white suburbs and eventually affecting the youth in the “hinterlands.” California is no longer the trendsetting force it was once reputed to be.
- Kids are wearing our products in their everyday lives. They sport goggles on the subway in New York and designers are using snowboard wear as the pattern for street wear.
- Music is an incredibly important part of the youth culture, so record companies and record stores are becoming primary players in partnerships to reach the youth.
- Trends, like technology, are quick to change among kids. A trend can be passé about the same time it is spotted.
The Outreach
The mechanisms for reaching and influencing the youth market are not necessarily traditional ones, as Nike and others have well demonstrated.
- We can make use of street-smart influencers. Give them our products, make them stand out among their peers. Being part of a team and getting “free stuff” is big!
- There is a broad range of publications that speak to the special interests of today’s youth. An image campaign can literally be focused at the audience we want without paying the rates of large, nationally-distributed magazines.
- Manufacturers with products that market directly to these kids (clothing, soft drinks, shoes) are anxious to develop associations and partnerships with activities like ours that these kids participate in.
NSAA’s team also emphasizes that continuing open-eyed, open-eared research is going to be a key to success. We must continually evaluate the messages we send out to understand how we look to the youth market. Do we look old? Do we look smug? What are their perceptions of our sport—dull or exciting, confining and restrictive or free and cool?
Many competitors for the loyalty and interest of the youth market will have lots more leverage and buying power than we. We must understand our strengths and weaknesses and position ourselves in ways that make us unique and desirable.
The Dilemma
While it may be eminently do-able to craft some effective tools for the industry to use in building our future around the “echo boom” generation, Michael Berry is taking a long, hard look at some of the downside factors that may be involved.
“The most crucial body of business our resorts depend on today, and for at least the next decade,” says Berry, “is the same one that was our bread-and-butter for the last 20: the babyboomers. The trouble is they are entering their forties and fifties, still very active, but with their own stature and style. I’m not sure they want extreme anything,” Berry cautions, “and many of the kids we’re appealing to like extreme everything.”
He acknowledges that rebelliousness has always been a rite of passage for the young teenager, but that in past generations it has largely been absorbed within the family unit. “What is different now,” says Berry, “is that rebelliousness has almost become institutionalized and kids ‘belong’ by joining with other rebels in displaying their independence from authority.”
This is not a paranoid vision of Vail being terrorized by the warring Cryps and Bloods. It is recognition that today there are different youth dynamics throughout the culture which know no boundaries, economic or geographic. What concerns Berry is that an industry-wide program to get the 12 to 16-year olds to identify with skiing and boarding could bring some culture clashes reminiscent of the earlier, high-profile culture clashes between boarders and skiers.
“If you operate a successful winter sports area that caters to upscale ski families,” Berry asks, “shouldn’t you think twice before tilting the balance at your area from smooth and stylish to ripping sick lines? Or from the Beatles to Pearl Jam? Or from gold chains to pierced noses?”
Berry still believes in the importance of assuring our industry’s future by building participation among the young. The demographics are very persuasive on the need for such a commitment. But he wants to make sure that, in tweaking our messages to appeal to the youth market, we don’t alienate what is now our core business. “There are plenty of other attractive options for those maturing baby boomers,” says Berry, “and if we are not sensible we could lose a lot of them to sun sports and adventure travel. We can’t afford that.”
