Brief by Central Staff
Tourism Marketing – March 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
Back in our August edition, Ed Quillen wrote an essay about how much he didn’t like “Colorado’s Headwaters of Adventure” as a marketing slogan for Chaffee County, and along the way, he pointed out how the slogan survey conducted about a year ago was full of inappropriate and irrelevant questions.
At the time, that piece didn’t inspire much comment, but now there are a lot of people writing newspaper letters and complaining about the slogan and how it was adopted.
So many, in fact, that the “official roll-out” scheduled for Feb. 17 was changed to a “question- and-answer session.” That comes at an inconvenient time for this magazine, so any account of the meeting will have to appear in a later edition.
The criticisms of the slogan come in several varieties. Some of it is satisfaction with the old tagline, “Now THIS is Colorado,” adopted about 20 years ago after a contest. (Our publisher entered it then with “Where Colorado Comes True.”)
Some critics have pointed out that “Headwaters of Adventure” is focused on summer raft traffic, even though there’s an abundance of other recreational activity, from ghost-town visits to 14er-climbing, from horse-back riding to downhill skiing.
Another is accuracy: The Arkansas River has its headwaters in Lake County, not Chaffee, and Headwaters Hill, site of a rare triple divide, is in Saguache County.
Then there’s the impression that one entrepreneur is getting his business promoted at taxpayer expense — the marketing campaign is funded by the Chaffee County Visitor’s Bureau, which is in turn funded by a lodging tax in the county. That businessman is Ray Kitson of Salida, who owns Headwaters Outdoor Equipment and American Adventure Expeditions.
Then there’s the official Headwaters of Adventure logo. It has Salida and Buena Vista, but does not mention Poncha Springs, the other incorporated municipality in the county. Perhaps Poncha got left off because it’s not on the Arkansas River, and thus it just doesn’t fit in with the whitewater-theme-park motif.
On Feb. 9, the Poncha Springs town Board of Trustees voted unaimously to put a question on the April municipal election ballot. It will ask whether the town should set up its own lodging tax to use for promotion, thereby removing the town from the county’s tax and marketing.
Poncha provides about $2,500 a year in lodging tax. Shane Hale, assistant town administrator, said “The only reason we’re doing this is because we feel we can represent our town and the businesses in Poncha Springs better than we’re being represented now.”
Some sharp-eyed folks have noted that Lee Hart, the branding consultant who gave us Headwaters of Adventure, runs a company called “Peak Exposure.” Turn to page 17 of the new 2004 Visitors’ Guide, and the subhead for an article about local mountains says: “PEAK EXPOSURE. If wealth were measured vertically, Chaffee County would be the richest little county in the country….” The copy thereafter is a bit of a stretch, since it implies that Chaffee County has fifteen peaks over 14,000 feet, when in fact there are only a dozen.
Despite all of the criticism, though, Headwaters of Adventure will likely be used for at least the next two years. That’s on account of the lead times for preparing and distributing tourist propaganda.
Thus we have all received advice to get with the program and tie our own marketing and promotion to the overall county slogan. Some artists have complied, with “Adventures in Art.” Perhaps even the Wall Street Journal has joined, with its “Adventures in Capitalism.”
But as much as we’d like to be team players, we have no plans to become “Adventures in Monthly Magazine Journalism near the Headwaters.”
