After the Ypulse Youth Marketing Mashup, we heard a lot of positive feedback around one of our user-generated lunch speakers: Nate Bosshard, Action Sports & Outdoor Brand Manager for The North Face, and the discussion he moderated around leveraging the value of mobile apps for youth marketing.

I had the pleasure of connecting with Nate on the phone to hear more of his insight and find out what's coming next for The North Face's own Snow Report App, which provides the current weather, forecast and snow base for resorts around the globe, along with driving directions. Here's what I took away from our discussion…

The 'There's An App For That' Factor
The inception of the original TNF app was sparked by Nate's own experience as a snow sports enthusiast. Considering that, "We're an outdoor sports company. We want people to be on their phone as little as possible," his objective for the project was to "offer value" as a brand. In other words, forgoing entertainment for utility, as an extension of what the brand was doing already. The result? A problem-solver, an app that provided information and tools for outdoor enthusiasts in their element.

College Students Are Athletes, Too
When I asked Nate about creating a presence on college campuses he made the point that the focus for his company, and action sports/outdoor brands in general, is on inspiring the psychographic vs. the demographic, "Our goal is to always present our brand in the most pinnacle environment we can. As soon as you start to get people where they are everyday, you lose the brand's original intention." The takeaway? Nobody wants to be pandered to.

Don't Put A Price On Brand Equity
The other day I heard an argument for sports marketers to take their focus off ROI as the purchase process is often too multi-tiered across multiple touch points. Similar thinking went into offering a free product, as Nate explains "I think it’s a pretty powerful win for a brand, if your logo is on someone's phone." In many ways this goes back to the drive to create an app that offers an on-demand service versus gratuitous entertainment.

Our Job's Not Over, Until The Customer Sings
As many of you know, it's not that expensive to launch an app. The key, according to Nate, is to not just create it, launch it and think your job is over, but to really, truly listen to your customer feedback.. and then follow through. To that end, Nate promises the upgraded 2.0 version of The Snow Report coming out in a few weeks takes into account customer concerns from the original. Additional features will provide 72-hour totals, web cams, global reporting, a global conditions top ten list, avalanche info, and higher resolution versions of popular resort trail maps. Two of the biggest features in development: a Twitter feature that aggregates tweets inside the app as well hashtags outside that are relevant to the user's resort as well as a "push feature: that will alert users to the right conditions through SMS texting.

For more coverage of the latest trends and developments in mobile technology for youth, check out the Ypulse Mobile Channel.

Categorized under: Mobile

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