Chill Factorᵉ

marketing had lost their mojo and the business was hooked on discounting

Chill Factorᵉ is home to the UK’s longest indoor ski slope and the coolest family day out in the North West! With some 1.4m visitors each year, it is stand-alone destination attraction with a breadth of retail outlets, bar and restaurant offerings plus an indoor ski centre with real snow.

Right from the start this was a busy hands-on business turnaround role that required a clear plan and single minded approach to tackle three key areas:

Deal, deal, deal...

The business had become addicted to deals and discounts. The more they discounted the less people came... so they discounted more... and it was the beginnings of a downwards spiral.

Guests don't come because it is cheap. It is all about excitement, fun and keeping top of mind. Bringing these brand basics back into the marketing mix up lifted sales and drove the business forwards. We found the more fun we had creating excitement in our messaging and campaigns then the stronger the customer engagement and sales uplift.

Launching a new snow park, which was all about fun no skills needed snow activities (sledging, tubing and luge), meant we could creatively market the business outside the small core skiing fraternity to a much bigger family audience. The subsequent marketing halo we then created drove top of mind awareness and thus sales right across the business.

Complicated vs Simple

Chill Factorᵉ is fundamentally a simple business, but the products and offering had over time become unnecessarily complicated. This meant they were hard to communicate and purchase!

By adopting a 'fewer bigger better' approach to promotions we stripped them back to a few hard working headline activities that had strong guest appeal.

Next we began stripping back the product offer and simplifying it. This greatly aided communication and ease of purchase.

A number of good quality reviews and recommendations for the website had been completed but not implemented. The enormity of the task ahead was daunting in an environment with little resource. Breaking it down into individual units/tasks with clear ownership wrapped up in project-lite planning created the traction that was needed.

We've lost our Mojo!

The marketing team had got themselves into a place where they were very stretched. To the point where they were trying to do everything at once and delivering not very much.

This meant the rest of the business didn't respect them and their own sense of value was low as the harder they worked the more they seamed to fail.

They were a good team of guys and it was the process that was broken not them!

To turn things around the gift was theirs... we focused on delivering well the few key things that would make the big differences, de-prioritising
everything else that was a 'nice to have'. At the same time we began celebrating our successes and sharing this good work with the rest of the business.

The net effect being we delivered, won back our self esteem and the respect of the business.

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