Snow Days
Card-carrying snowmobilers suit up this month. Will the weather hold?
When the Quebec Federation of Snowmobile Clubs met this fall, a rep from Yamaha offered a free hat to anyone holding a Yamaha club card. Dozens of folks lined up, card in hand, to collect. Ed Klim was impressed.
“These guys must have blue blood they’re so brand loyal,” says Klim, president of the International Snowmobile Manufacturers Assocation, Haslett, MI.
Loyalty drives marketing in the $9 billion North American snowmobile industry. The four primary manufacturers – Yamaha Motor Corp., Polaris Industries, Bombardier (Ski-Doo), and Arctic Cat – each maintain an owners’ club. This year, Polaris launches a kids’ club and Ski-Doo converts to an online-only club called PowerUsers.
Polaris’s new PRO Club Go for kids builds on its 15-year-old PRO (for “Polaris Registered Owners”) Club. Kids six to 15 are automatically registered when their families buy a new sled. Members get licensed videogames, deals on clothes and accessories, and periodic mailings featuring spokescharacter PRO-Tektor. PRO Club Go has 5,000 members and expects 25,000 by year’s end. The Lacek Group, Minneapolis, handles.
The club is part of an aggressive repositioning launched in March, when Polaris broke ads tagged “The Way Out” to pitch snowmobiles (and ATVs, motorcycles, and watercraft) “as a vacation rather than a recreational vehicle,” says president Tom Tiller, who rode across Alaska with Polaris’s co-founders (now 78 and 80) and seven others to jump-start sales. “It’s the same trip our founder made 40 years ago to launch the snowmobile industry,” Tiller says.
Separately, Medina, MN-based Polaris makes a cameo appearance in the prize pool for MGM Home Entertainment’s October-through-January James Bond 007 Sweepstakes. Grand prizes include a Polaris motorcycle and jacket; secondary prizes include snowmobiles, ATVs, watercraft, and clothes. Polaris’s logo appears in ads and on P-O-P.
Meanwhile, Ski-Doo.com has signed up 60,000 PowerUser members since its August launch. Members get e-mail updates on race results, advance notice on promos, and special deals. The online club replaces Club Ski-Doo, a five-year-old direct-mail program. “The bang for our buck is much greater online,” says spokesperson David Thompson. Members were encouraged to join PowerUser, but weren’t automatically converted.
Separately, Ski-Doo partners with GMC for a Canada-only sweeps awarding GMC trucks with decals just like snowmobiles. Wausau, WI-based Ski-Doo also just finished Snow Sellabration, which offered $1,000 off a new 1999 or 2000 sled or $400 worth of clothing and accessories with purchase of a 2001 model. Ads, tagged “Weigh Your Options,” run on ESPN and in enthusiast books via Cramer-Krasselt, Milwaukee.
Arctic Cat, Thief River Falls, MN, has 10,000 members in its Cat’s Pride club. For $25 per year ($50 for a family), members get frequent discount offers, shirts, hats, a lapel pin, videotape, and Pride magazine, a quarterly mailed free to new owners for two years. An annual Watch It Being Built contest brings one winner to the factory to see his sled built from scratch. Club members’ pre-season and custom orders are automatically entered. Ads, tagged “More to Go On,” pitch high-end features at lower cost. Periscope, Minneapolis, handles.
Yamaha ran a price promo (1.9 percent interest or $300 back) through October. The Coon Rapids, MN-based company also sponsors 41 grass drag-racing events July through September.
Dogged by warm winters, total snowmobile unit sales fell in 1999 (to 230,887) and 2000 (to 208,297) after at least five years on the rise and a 1997 high of 260,735 units. “All the marketing in the world won’t work if there’s no snow,” says Klim.
Marketers will stay in touch with existing customers while they keep a weather eye out. “If we get some snow, we’ll have a great year,” says Ski-Doo’s Thompson.
If not, there’s always grass drag racing.
– Of the 208,297 snowmobiles sold worldwide this year, 136,601 were in the U.S. and 51,995 in Canada.
– The average suggested retail price of a new snowmobile in 2000 was $5,850.
– The average annual household income for a snowmobile owner is $60,000.
– There are approximately 2.3 million registered snowmobiles in North America.
Source: International Snowmobile Manufacturers Association
