Soul Factory: The Action-Outdoor Industry’s Greatest Asset

Click on the photo to see the previous post in the series, including the slides that accompanied this talk at the 2011 Whitewater Symposium..

Let’s start with the raw material: your beliefs, or in this case, an industry’s beliefs.

It’s easy to come together and align on some industry-wide core beliefs that motivate us to get up every morning and go out and do what we love to do. Beliefs are valuable, as they connect individuals, companies and trade groups. People resonate with people who share common beliefs. People are in some way touched by what you believe and want to learn more.

What the whitewater industry and any outdoor vertical (think surfing or riding powder) has going for it is the timeless and powerful association with soulful experience. I contend that we, as paddling enthusiasts, can and should rally around the core truths summoned from the acts of paddling a river, climbing a mountain, riding a mountain stash and surfing a wave.

Walt Whitman said, “Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.”

That’s all people are looking for: a true representation of an experience that they trust will be made available to them should they elect to participate. And that’s what the Whitewater Symposium is all about — coming together as an industry to work together and find ways to grow the level of participation in paddle sports.

I was fortunate to be speaking to experienced marketers like “Jaymo” Kris Jamieson, Marketing Manager of Mountain Sports and Culture over at GoPro. Jaymo said,

“The main thing I left with, and had never before heard, was the concept of the ‘Soul Factory.’ Quick! Get out there and trademark that before Wieden + Kennedy steals it. Granted, Brandon was speaking specifically about the paddlesports industry, but all of action sports, and even those stick and ball sports, need a ‘Soul Factory’ that every brand helps cultivate thru some industry-wide practices.”

While I may be an idealist, as Jaymo points out in my next post on this topic, I believe that outdoor companies are composed of good, soulful people. Together, we can redefine how our industry coordinates our content marketing efforts to promote the larger reasons why we are an industry in the first place.

Next up, in Act 2: Even Corporations Have a Soul, a discussion with Amy BonDurant, Teva’s Senior Marketing Manager of Content on the origination and success of Teva’s Live Better Stories Campaign.

To see the slides from my talk and get an introduction to where I’m headed in this series, see yesterday’s post, How Action Sports Industries Can Surge Through Content Marketing.