4. Strategies and Tactics:

Strategies:

• Make connection between mountainboarding and activities popular among target audience. To appeal to the target audience’s current beliefs and attitudes by having events and tactics tie in with audience’s current activities and views. This will help increase awareness and create a positive perception of mountainboarding as safe and mainstream.
• Generate stories about female mountainboarders in media. To create an image of the different characteristics of mountainboarders that is not extreme and the audience can relate to.
• Include current female mountainboarders in process. They can offer suggestions and opinions to make the campaign more effective and personal. With their input we can increase awareness and make mountainboarding interactive and geared toward college-age women. The media would also have interest in these women.
• Get target audience members involved in formulating an opinion. Can get the target audience involved in order to gain credibility among those potentially interested. This is important because if there are good opinions it can change the attitude or behavior of others, this will particularly help form a new image of mountainboarding.
• Get audience interested in industry and events. Mountainboarding needs more participants. After the target audience is exposed to mountainboarding, it still needs to be motivated to follow the industry and events. Those first adapters to mountainboarding should want to know what’s happening in mountainboarding as part of increasing their awareness.
• Separate mountainboarding from its “extreme” image. Generate media interest that is interesting and newsworthy. This is a very important component to the campaign and is necessary in changing the general image of mountainboarding.
  
• Get public opinion leaders to discuss mountainboarding. Public opinion leaders make up a small percentage of the population but have a far reach of who they influence. By getting talk show hosts to discuss mountainboarding either from an experience they had or set up, we can increase the buzz around mountainboarding rapidly. This will also help persuade the audience to embrace mountainboarding and change its imagery.
• Get features in main newspapers and influential magazines. Features and columns in the print media can be very important for promoting mountainboarding as a fun activity that is safe and mainstream. By having writers and reporters for influential newspapers and magazines, the topic of mountainboarding can resonate for months in the audience’s minds.
  

Tactics:

• Create a website with message board. The website will be a “just-for-girls” one dedicated to female alternative sports athletes, and college female interests such as clothes shopping, dorm shopping, and music. It will be designed by current female mountainboarders and will have links for mountainboarding gear and mountainboarding news, as well as contain a message board for people to post any questions or information, particularly about mountainboarding. This site will make a connection between mountainboarding and other activities as well as get the target audience involved in formulating an opinion and learning more about the industry and events. It can be the main reference source for the media to use to obtain facts and figures on women’s mountainboarding.
• Show different “boarders” mountainboard on terrain in different college cities. Have local skateboarding, surfing, and snowboarding legends compete against each other by mountainboarding on local terrain in the college cities, Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. This contest, dubbed “legend of the sea vs. legend of the mountain on legendary land,” will take place on the hilly terrains of Boston Common and Central Park, and in a skating park in Los Angeles. It will take place simultaneously on the same day and will also include a campaign kickoff celebration featuring a free mountainboard giveaway to ten random participants and banners all over the place with the mountainboarding website on it and postcard sized cards with the upcoming campaign events and general mountainboarding events. Local, college, and national newspapers and television stations will be notified and sent a press release in advance about this event. The main purpose of having this event first is to attract attention and increase awareness among a group of people who are already more likely to be interested in trying it out (as the innovators) and to rely on the media to spread this information about mountainboarding.
• Visit seven college campuses throughout the year, lead by current star female mountainboarders. Colleges include UCLA, Northwestern, UMASS-Boston, Wellesley, NYU, University of Maryland-College Park, and Oberlin. The tour will include a computer-generated “design-your-own-board” event, board fitting event, mock terrain course to test out, question and answer session with female mountainboarders, and discussion with managers of local resorts in surrounding areas about what their resorts offer mountainboarders. The finale of each event will be a concert by a favorite campus band. This event will be promoted to the media through a press release in advance. This tactic will help increase awareness of mountainboarding, its accessibility, safety-tips and can include coverage by campus newspapers and local newspapers.

Originally by
Lisa Damast
CM 301
11/9/05