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How to win friends and influence people...

By. G.D.

By. G.D. Maxwell

To the extent I am cynical – and not even I could argue that I’m not – I like to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the folks who struggled through the early years to hone the black magic we currently call marketing. Then again, it could just be genetic, a rogue twist on my DNA spiral crowding up against the Hopeless Romantic gene, a benign mutation of the Undaunted Optimist sequence. Someone said cynics are just optimists who’ve been disappointed once too often. I don’t know who.

In the seminal years of marketing, flogging product on an unsuspecting public wasn’t far removed from the sale of Snake Oil. It was a time best personified by the phrase "Sell the sizzle, not the steak." That’s because in most cases the sizzle was being provided by either a soundtrack or a tiny bit of salt pork rendering in an unseen skillet. The steak was in the mail, sucker. COD.

My epiphany, the making of a cynic if you will, probably occurred in a dark movie theatre on a Saturday afternoon. I was hooked on serials. Batman, Rocket Man, Superman, tired reshowings of Flash Gordon, you name it, it filtered through town, always with a, well, sizzling trailer to catch my attention and an admission loss leader.

My favourite was the 867 episodes of Rocket Man. Okay, maybe there were only 15, it just seemed to go on forever. Dusting Rocket Man off the shelf was the idea of the people who made Mountain Dew. The soda, not moonshine. It was the new kid on the fizzy drink block, fighting for some kind of recognition and, even then, youth acceptance. The offer was this: bring in a pocketful of Mountain Dew bottle caps, get into the theatre for free.

What a deal! Every Friday a couple of us would make the rounds of gas stations who sold Mountain Dew in their coolers, rifle through the bin that caught bottle caps and find the price of admission. As an adult, I’ve developed empathy for what the cashier must have been going through on those Saturdays. Several hundred kids sliding several thousand sticky bottle caps under the glass and, I imagine, right into a garbage can. Big yuck factor.

By episode three, I began to recognize a lot of the other kids. Mostly by the backs of their heads. It was important to avoid sitting behind the kids with big heads, the loud talkers, the squealers, the farters, the ones who may only have bathed on Saturday night. Likewise, you didn’t want to be in front of kickers, throwers, chokers or spitters. It was my first lesson in logistics.

But I digress.

Each episode of a serial ended with Rocket Man in mortal peril, plummeting from the sky, over a cliff, caught in an industrial crusher, naked in front of the class, reciting poetry, whatever, you get the idea. And the trailer for next week would show lots of kapow action, reinforcing the foregone conclusion that somehow, the hero would get out of the mess he was in and kick the living bejesus out of the bad guys.

After about, oh say, adolescence, I finally figured it out. The good guys always escaped, the bad guys always tricked them again, good guys always won in the end and the owner of the theatre sold enough popcorn and Jujubes to put his kids through college and buy a new Cadillac every other year.

I’m sure I was going somewhere with this when I started it about 500 words ago. Oh yeah, marketing. And the answer to the annual question: What kind of ski season was 2001-2002?

In a word, marketing. It was a marketing kind of ski season. It was the year when "nothing will ever be the same again." It was the year of airplanes as guided missiles. It was the year when small minded assholes cloaked in the religious cloth of narrowminded indignation brought their intolerance out of the squalid little corners of the world they usually wallow in and onto the larger stage.

The skiing was pretty good too.

There were powder days on empty slopes in December and a busy like crazy Christmas week. Weird long spells of cold, dry weather in each of January, February and March let those of us who spend most of our ski days off piste get reacquainted with the take-flight thrill of highspeed cruising on runs buffed to the texture of fine silk.

It was the year of the groomers. They seemed to have so much time and so little new snow to deal with they groomed things I’d never seen groomed before. An interstate mysteriously appeared down the middle of Heavenly Basin on Blackcomb, moguls magically flattened out around Green Chair. The Weasel and Fallaway seemed to get a lot more attention than in past years. It was the first time I’d ever found myself wondering if I had my bindings set high enough to handle the torque I dreamed I was throwing on them, a thought guaranteed to slow you right down in the middle of one of those blind rollers on Tokum.

Conversely, it was not a stellar powder year despite December’s tease. But hope springs eternal. The weather gurus who study such things have divined another El Niño developing in the Pacific. That’s one child we should welcome back with open arms, especially if his little seester comes ‘round the following year.

But more than anything else, it was a marketing year. The smart boys and girls at the Mothercorp and the equally smart boys and girls at Tourism Whistler – who really ought to run a contest to come up with a new name that doesn’t sound like a civil service department – revved up the sizzle machine and made it mouthwatering for skiers in the lower mainland and Washington markets to brave the Killer Highway and come play with us.

And come they did. In a post-911 tourist season, a season when many resorts danced a slow dirge into bankruptcy court, Whistler did just fine thank you. Despite the doom and gloom of some of our business leaders who think "sustainability" means sustainably increasing profits, it was hard work, smart marketing, good snow and a really, really good product – those would be long term building blocks – that gave people looking for a winter’s escape an irresistible place to dream about.

So give this season a 7.5 out of 10 – good beat, easy to dance to – with special kudos to the marketing section. And stay tuned next season to see if we can do it all again.