The cities of Sun Valley and Ketchum, whose economies depend heavily on tourism, set out more than three months ago to construct a new marketing board to create and execute marketing strategies for them.
Leaders in both communities said constructing better marketing is critical to energizing a local economy up to its neck in the torrential troubles of the nation's real estate markets. City leaders compared the local economy to a gravely ill patient in need of emergency treatment.
But the patient is still on the gurney and waiting for life-saving treatment to arrive in the form of marketing for the winter season that's just around the corner.
The doctors—the mayors and councils in both cities—are still conferring, seemingly caught in a glacially slow government traffic jam that has left the area with no cogent marketing plan to date.
All marketing experts preach two things: consistency and creativity. Both take time and money. Right now, businesses in the cities have the benefit of neither.
By refusing to renew their contracts for marketing with the Sun Valley-Ketchum Chamber & Visitors Bureau, the cities became totally responsible for marketing.
Normally, winter marketing plans are in place by spring to provide lead time for research, design and placement of advertising where it has the best chance to influence potential winter visitors.
The cities have squandered that lead time. With a concerted effort, all may not be lost. But marketing must happen—and soon—unless the patient is to become an unwitting experimental subject in a test of what may happen with no marketing.
Wherefore, then, winter marketing?
