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Slats Grabski

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I saw Slats Grabski up at Tantamount on the last day of the ski season. He skied slush until the lifts closed, and I caught him on the sundeck, looking for shade behind a beer.

"Hiya, Slats," I said. "Alone?"

"Waiting for my grandkids to quit playing foosball. Look at this." He pushed a paper napkin at me. It was covered with circles and arrows.

"What's is it?"

"It's the secret to marketing to kids."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, my 12-year-old granddaughter wrote this out for me at lunch. It's a diagram of middle school social life."

I looked at the napkin carefully. "Umm, it looks like a bunch of balloons."

"What's at the edge?"

"Maybe it's a tree. It says Poplar."

"That's the Popular kids."

"The opinion leaders!"

"Wrong. According to my grandkids, the self-styled Popular kids are pretty, but dumb. They're marginal. If you're too smart, they don't let you sit at their table. So no one pays much attention to what they think. But they are jocks. My grandkids say 10 percent of the class is Popular. It's a closed group. The Popular girls only date Popular boys."

"What's this just next to them?"

"The Almost Popular. They're pretty, too, but they take their schoolwork more seriously and aren't so self-involved. This is about 20 percent of the group. They date each other."

"And here in the middle?"

"There you got your Weird kids, about 60 percent of the group. There are two subgroups - the Weird Populars, who are already dating, and the Smart Weirdos, who don't date yet. I think the Weird Populars are feeling their adolescent hormones, and the Smart Weirdos haven't got there yet." "I see there's a crowd of Nerds and Freaks around the fringe." "The Nerds hang out with the Smart Weirdos, sort of. The Freaks are out there - by eighth grade some of these kids get Gothed up. Nerds and Freaks together make up the last 10 percent."

"So how legitimate are these groups? What would a sociologist call them?"

"Doesn't matter. All that matters is that there are three or four separate groups who don't mix. It's better to think of them as tribes, instead of as a hierarchy."

"Okay. Now, the Weirdos are 60 percent of the school?"

"Yup."

"Well, if the Weirdos are the majority, doesn't that make them non-weird, or normal, or mainstream?"

"That's the magic. The word Weird doesn't mean they're different from other kids. It means they're different from the adult world."

"Ah."

"When we were that age, we read Mad Magazine and were cynical about advertising. So message number one from this napkin is that the majority of these kids aren't going to listen to anything your marketing department cooks up."

"Umm. That's bad."

"No, it's good. It means this isn't a problem for marketing. The marketing guy here would never get a handle on it. How would an ad agency cook up separate messages to each of these separate tribes?"

"Oh. Good point."

"Message number two is that most of these kids don't want to hang out with adults. They want to hang out with their tribe buddies."

"Got it."

"If they could get up here on their own hook, without adult supervision, they'd do it in a minute. They can't wait to drive - when they do, they'll escape."

"Right. But they could ride the bus now."

"That brings us to message three: There's no social mobility in this world. Populars don't hang with Weirdos. Weirdos hang only with other Weirdos."

"So?"

"So they're not thrilled about being dumped into a random group of kids. It might contain members of a hostile tribe. You won't get these kids to ride a bus unless you can guarantee that their best friends are also on the bus."

"Ah."

"So my best shot at getting my grandkids up here is to bring a small herd of tribe members. My sixth-grade granddaughter says she's a Smart Weirdo, and she wants to teach her Smart Weirdo friends to ski. My eighth-grade grandson wants his own crew."

"How many?"

"Two or three each."

"That's cool."

"Yeah? I'm going to pay for six day tickets and six lunches so I can make two runs with my own brood before they dump me? How often do you think I'll do that?" "I can see where you're going here."

"The result is that these kids don't ski too often. On weekends, they have birthday parties and sleepovers with their gangs. Social stuff is way cooler to them than tagging along with adult relatives."

"So you gotta invite the social group."

"Bingo. I'd love to drag them up here more often, but it's gotta be cool for them and I gotta be able to afford it."

"And the ski area doesn't make that easy."

"Right. Like I said, it's not a marketing problem. It's a sales problem. And that means it can be fixed. What if the resort offered a peer-group twofer? Or an adult-and-two-kids discount deal? What about a Birthday Special - invite six kids for the price of three? You'd get kids up here who never want to be separated from their buddies. And, there's a snowball effect."

"Yeah. They call that viral marketing now."

"No kidding? That's cool. I bring up two or three or six kids, and then next week some other parent brings 'em. If you're lucky it could get geometric, just like the flu."

"You know, as long as you're being flexible on group pricing for kids . . ."

"I'm ahead of you. A family discount should include any combination of one adult and several kids."

"So a single parent, or a grandparent, or an uncle or aunt, could round up a bunch of kids and get a discount."

"Or a scoutmaster. Call it the Pied Piper Pass. Turn every skiing Boomer into an ambassador to middle schools. Turn 'em into unpaid bus drivers."

"This is very cool, Slats. Only thing is, the ski area will never do it."

"Why not?"

"It's a weekend program. The place is already packed on weekends - they don't have to offer discounts to fill the parking lot on Saturday."

"But they already offer all kinds of weekend discounts. Supermarket sales, buddy cards, Cendant coupons, you name it. And this deal puts three or four or five incremental customers in each car."

"Hungry, hamburger-buying customers."

"Right. And you know what the real beauty of this is?"

"Tell me."

"This is a chance to hook 'em before they learn to drive. So they'll have a destination in mind for that first weekend behind the wheel. If the ski area goes for it, I'm gonna buy a tow truck."