Clever Creative: Resorting to Reviews

We’ve all gone on Yelp, to find a place for dinner and used customer reviews to help inform our decisions. To a customer, product or service reviews can be a deciding factor. They can make or break the company’s reputation, but they are often times overlooked by marketing departments. In today’s “Clever Creative,” we’ll examine one company’s newest print and digital campaign that successfully resorted to reviews.

Snowbird Ski Resort:

Reviews can be a treasure trove of useful information, and apparently marketing material. We’ve all seen companies use rave reviews to boost product sales, but rarely do we see the bad ones used. Snowbird Ski Resort in Utah is doing just that. Their marketing team isn’t the first to utilize bad customer reviews, but they are the first to use them to sell to people that like exactly what Greg from Los Angeles, California, didn’t. The 1-star rating reads;

Too advanced. I’ve heard Snowbird is a tough mountain, but this is ridiculous. It felt like every trail was a steep chute or littered with tree wells. How is anyone supposed to ride in that? Not fun!

This description of the mountain might not appeal to beginner and ametuer skiers and snowboarders, but that’s because they aren’t Snowbird’s target market. However, if an adrenaline junkie who loves the thrill of having to dodge tree wells, cut through deep snow and rocket down steep hills reads that review, they’ll probably book a room at the resort ASAP. On top of that, the image serving as the background to the review is daunting, yet breathtaking, and will have advanced skiers and snowboarders drooling for the opportunity to enjoy the powder as much as the guy in the picture.

This ad is just one of those that will appear online and in magazines like Freeskier, POWDER and TransWorld SNOWboarding in the coming weeks. The concept is simple, using customer reviews as the copy to sell the resort, however, the execution is genius. Anyone can take a good review and use it, but it takes skill to spin a negative review into a positive one that can be used to advertise to a target market. There are many approaches to advertising a product or service, but if your company decides to resort to reviews, Snowbird’s campaign acts as the ideal illustration of how it should be done.

Let us know what you think of these ads, and be on the lookout for next week’s installment of Clever Creative!

If you’re looking for some clever creative of your own, feel free to contact us.

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• Creativity
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• Clever Creative
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• Snowbird Ski Resort
• Reviews