How Lake Tahoe decided to own the color blue

They cut photos from magazines and created collages illustrating their perfect vacation.

They wrote imaginary postcards home, telling their friends about Lake Tahoe.

They pretended to describe Lake Tahoe to an alien.

By the time they were done, consumers in focus groups across the United States had provided the cornerstones of the big new advertising program rolled out last week by the Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority.

It's an ambitious effort, seeking to boost Lake Tahoe into the pantheon of must-see national icons another Golden Gate Bridge, another Half Dome at Yosemite, another Hollywood sign across the hills.

And it's all about blue.

"It's going to be an odd sell," acknowledged Cori Boone, an account planner at the Sacramento advertising agency Mering and Associates.

"We're going to own blue." Odd or not, the new sales effort is supported by a $200,000 research project that dug deeply into consumers to discover how they feel about Lake Tahoe.

When Mering and Associates won the advertising account in mid-2002, Boone said the agency's experts were struck that Lake Tahoe didn't have its rightful spot as a national treasure.

That's an important distinction as the Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority seeks to boost the number of destination visitors who spend several days or weeks at the lake.

The ad agency commissioned researchers from Smith and Co.

of Mendocino, Calif., to gather data about consumers' perceptions.

And not just any perceptions.

At a dozen focus groups in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas and Phoenix, researchers wanted to learn everything they could about the emotional responses to Lake Tahoe.

That's where the collages, postcards and imaginary conversations with aliens came in.

"It all came down to the foundation.

There's only one Lake Tahoe," Boone said.

But researchers went further, probing consumers' emotions about the lake itself.

The answer was blue.

Time and again, consumers used blue "the clearest blue," "the deepest blue" to describe their feelings about the lake.

The collages they created were filled with blue.

From there, it wasn't a big step for the ad agency to decide that Lake Tahoe will seek ownership of blue with an advertising campaign that makes an unabashedly emotional pitch.

The initial media buy for the campaign known as "The Blue World" which includes a heavy schedule of magazine advertising is budgeted at $1.5 million.

Expensive as the research may have been, it was critical to the Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority's ability to take a fresh look at itself, said Bill Chernock, executive director of the visitors authority.

"We wanted no assumptions.

That was the first pitfall we had to avoid," he said.

Along the way, some of the widely held assumptions about Lake Tahoe as a destination were challenged.

One small item, Chernock said, was the discovery that consumers think of winter when they hear the word "alpine." Ads selling a summertime alpine experience are climbing a steep slope.

Another discovery, Chernock said, is that consumers are more forgiving of South Lake Tahoe's infrastructure its strip of older motels, for example than locals are.

In fact, he said, some consumers view the older properties as part of the area's charm, a funky throwback to the family vacations of the 1950s and 1960s.

The emotional appeal of the new ads, which the visitors authority expects to be overriding theme of its advertising for at least four or five years, replaces a theme in which South Lake Tahoe marketed its dualities.

Those dualities gaming and outdoor sports, summer recreation and winter recreation, mountain and lake remain true, Chernock said.

But the research found that other destination resorts around the nation can make similar claims.

No place else, however, has Lake Tahoe.

"That was the most own-able," Chernock said.

"Nobody else can claim Lake Tahoe." Among the tactics used by the visitors authority to track the success of the ads will be source tracking the questions callers to toll-free lines are asked about how they learned about Lake Tahoe.