Published>Wed, Mar 03 10 01:24 PM
After American downhill and cross-country skiers won numerous medals at the Vancouver Olympics, some ski industry executives hoped the gold around athletes necks would mean more sales of ski equipment and lift tickets.
But at the largest U.S. cross-country ski festival over the weekend, most skiers and store owners doubted they would see much of a bump.
For the first time since 1976, several Americans won medals in Nordic, or cross-country, events at the Olympics. But despite that success, most amateur skiers could not tell the difference between Nordic combined skiing star Johnny Spillane, who won three silver medals in Vancouver, and Mickey Spillane, the detective novelist, said George Hovland, who owns a Nordic center in Duluth, Minn.
"It's such a foreign sport to most Americans," said Hovland, 83, who raced in the 1952 Olympics. Hovland spoke to Reuters at the American Birkebeiner event, the country's largest cross-country ski gathering with races through the frosty Wisconsin woods.
Valued at $100 million a year, including equipment and resort tickets, the U.S. Nordic skiing market is dwarfed by alpine skiing and snowboarding.
But all three sectors will likely struggle to cash in on the dozens of hours of prime Olympic airtime they received, executives say, just as they did four years ago at the Winter Olympics held in Turin, Italy.
Spending at U.S. ski shops slipped to $1.78 billion in winter 2007 from $1.8 billion a year earlier, according to trade group Snowsports Industries America.
One reason could be that small ski manufacturers and resorts cannot afford the television advertising that could lure people to try new sports, said Kelly Davis, research director for the trade group.
"All the anecdotal evidence around the excitement of the Games doesn't trump the data on sales," Davis said.
Nordic skiing, especially, struggles to connect Olympic airtime to commerce. It depends on natural snowfall more than skiing and boarding centers that can make their own snow to keep the lifts running all season.
Reduced snowfall in many years cut annual cross-country ski sales to about 1.2 million pairs worldwide from 2 million pairs in the 1980s, according to industry data.
"You can spend $1 million on marketing the sport, but if it doesn't snow, the spending doesn't matter," said Peter Ashley, a former skiing coach who now sells skis for a U.S. division of the privately owned Austrian company Fischer GMBH.
RECESSION BOOST
Ashley and others report good sales this season given heavy snowfall in many U.S. states and because the recession has drawn some cost-conscious skiers away from pricey resorts and lift tickets, and onto the nearest snow-covered golf course.
Fischer's cross-country sales were up 6 percent this season, Ashley said. In fact, Fischer and some other firms ran out of inventory since retailers were cautious about their orders after the economic meltdown of early 2009.
Among Fischer's rivals are Salomon, part of Finland's Amer Sports, and Madshus, owned by Jarden Corp.
Neither released sales data, but Madshus marketing manager Connor Folley said traffic on its website and on social-media services rose as Nordic athletes did well on the company's skis in Vancouver. "If marketing principles work out, that should lead to more sales," he said.
Another sore point for the ski industry is that Olympic rules prohibit many firms that are not Olympic sponsors from making much mention of sponsored athletes' accomplishments during the games. The result is some vague advertising: after U.S. snowboarder Shaun White struck gold in Vancouver, a blog post on the site of Burton Snowboards, one of his sponsors, coyly said, "Something ... happened last night. We can't really tell you much about it."
The Birkebeiner cross-country festival enjoyed a boom year with a record 8,350 participants. But Andy Canniff, marketing director for Swixsport USA, a unit of Norway's Swix Sport AS, said participants and the thousands of cowbell-clanging fans weren't talking about the Olympics, winding down the same weekend.
"There's no tie-in between what people see on TV and what they're doing themselves," Canniff said. "It kind of stinks."
Source: Web Search
0 comments:
Post a Comment