Snow Job

I heard a great story by Jeff Brady on NPR while on the way home yes­ter­day.  It was about the work of two researchers from Dart­mouth who found it odd that ski resorts seemed to report more snow­fall than sur­round­ing areas and and steeper increases in snow amounts on week­ends.  They also found that resorts close to major pop­u­la­tion cen­ters exag­ger­ated fig­ures even more.  These sci­en­tists were skep­ti­cal about this “week­end snow” effect, and started col­lect­ing data about it.  Turns out that ski resorts were in fact inflat­ing the snow fall amounts quite a bit, falsely using extra snowflakes as a mar­ket­ing tac­tic to get peo­ple to come out and hit the slopes.

Michael Berry, Pres­i­dent of the National Ski Areas Asso­ci­a­tion, said that ski resorts had often been “opti­mistic” with their past reports.  How­ever, he went on to say that this prac­tice is quickly dying.  Why?  Two rea­sons  — the iphone (or any mobile device) and social media plat­forms like Face­book and Twit­ter.  These tools and tech­nolo­gies are ren­der­ing snow reports obso­lete, as users report con­di­tions to their friends in real time.  The researchers stated that the num­ber of exag­ger­ated snow actu­ally reports dropped off sharply with the release of numer­ous iphone apps enabling users to doc­u­ment con­di­tions.  Mobile and social tech­nolo­gies are grow­ing fast and empow­er­ing peo­ple to bet­ter under­stand the world.  Many of the tech­niques and tac­tics that “opti­mistic” mar­keters could get away with in the past, are now becom­ing prob­lem­atic.  If you are not work­ing on build­ing trust as a core part of build­ing your busi­ness, you are sim­ply lying to your­self about your future prospects.

Berry had a great quote in the piece — one that tran­scends ski­ing.  “If you try and cre­ate a real­ity that you per­ceive to be the truth, it had bet­ter be con­sis­tent with the real­ity on the ground, because the con­sumer will remind you of it instantly.”

Ser­vice truly is the new mar­ket­ing.  Every con­sumer is a researcher.  Every cus­tomer is a jour­nal­ist.  Every­one is now what Mike Wal­lace or Con­sumer Reports once was — armed with flip cams, iphones, and 24 x 7 com­mu­ni­ca­tion net­works.  Peo­ple trust the advice of their friends. so work hard to make friends, earn trust, and daz­zle your cus­tomers.  Real peo­ple and their tweets, posts, and updates either rep­re­sent your next great new ad cam­paign or a dam­ag­ing expose on the truth about your company.