You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘inflatable whitewater raft’ tag.
Wildwater - A West Virginia Whitewater Rafting Company
With 2009 already underway and steaming toward West Virginia’s whitewater rafting season, I am working on developing and implementing our marketing plan. This includes everything from web content, web design and printed materials such as catalog and rack cards. The main challenge here is to make sure all the pieces reflect one voice and offer consistent information such as adventure availability and pricing. The goal is to keep our customers’ interest in our product and make it easy for them to get the information they need.
The challenge for a small company like Wildwater Expeditions is that this is pretty well a linear process because it’s me and 515 Creative, who develops the look of our printed pieces and the look and guts of our website. However, at the end of the day I am still the one who has to provide content, edits, pictures. I write the newsletters and emails. I have the pleasure of developing content for our catalog, website and other ancillary pieces. In many ways it’s a load of fun, but the struggles begin when I try to come up with fresh ways of delivering our message. Usually the first try winds up sounding pretty much like marketing speak: “The Upper Gauley, it’s fast, it’s big, it’s…” boring.
I want to create something that is conversational and conveys my excitement about being on the Gauley River or hiking on the rim of the New River Gorge. Somehow, I can picture it in my head, but can’t always get the words down on the laptop. Video and pictures certainly help, as do testimonials from people who’ve enjoyed the experience and are still pumped up. Video testimonials are probably even better. In my mind, the challenge is to integrate all these marketing media (print, web, daily interaction via phone and in person) to tell the story.
As I try my best to keep up with the explosion of tools at my disposal, I always get the feeling that I’m missing the boat somewhere. This is much like the times I’ve missed (or more correctly, fell out of) the boat while rafting a rapid like Insignificant on the Upper Gauley. First, when you fall out, the waters are churning and very confusing and with the underlying thread of, “I need to get back in the boat!” running through your head. Second, the raft heads down the river with or without you. I can’t say I enjoy the feeling.
At this point you have a couple of choices. You can float passively and hope good things happen or you can take actions that incrementally improve your situation. After all is said and done, I choose the latter and do the best I can to be more effective. That is my goal for Wildwater’s marketing efforts. I can only do so much so I need to choose wisely and focus my energies. It gets tough to focus when I’m all jacked up on coffee, but I’ll be doing the best I can in 2009 to work towards this goal. Hopefully that means a focused, easy to use piece for our guests to use when they are making decisions about their whitewater rafting vacation.
For the unitiated, there are a slew of boats from which to choose when outfitting your whitewater rafting fleet. Inflatable technology has been a model of punctuated equilibrium, i.e, innovations that truly change how we look at inflatables happen every so often, but for the most part the models we see every year represent tweaks to standard models.
Probably the last great inflatable innovation was the self-bailing floor. Basically, you have an inflatable floor that sits up a little higher than the surface of the water and there are holes (or grommets in laced-in floor construction) along the gunwales where the water drains. Before the advent of the self bailing rafts, if you were running a lengthy, beefy stretch, your boat would fill up with water making it harder to control. You would often have to catch an eddy in between drops, unhook your buckets and bail to lighten the load. Self-bailing rafts obviated the need for buckets, opening up more technical whitewater to inflatable navigation.
But I digress. We are looking at buying some new boats from NRS. We’ve gone with the standard 16-foot Expedition series from NRS for the past five years, but we are looking at a diminishing tube model with four thwarts. We’re trying to work out the dimensions as I write this. We should be seeing these boats sometime in late June or early July, which would be great so we can test drive them on the New River before running the Gauley River in the fall. As we find out more about the performance of these, I’ll keep you posted.
