Marketing Tips Courtesy of the North Star Lodge

I have written about the most unfortunate experience I have ever encountered regarding customer service and discrimination with the North Star Lodge in Killington, Vermont in several different ways. My other two popular blogs - Vermont Vibes and Vermont Music both share different angles of this terrible experience of entering a contest, being scammed for a timeshare ploy by the company using the entries as sales leads, falling for it, and then treated with rudeness, turned away from the actual tour, and discriminated against because of youthful appearance and casual dress - hey it's Vermont and I am a good Avon customer! Please check out these blogs for the story and my further investigation into the North Star Lodge owned in part by a previous timeshare fraud, under the subsidiary of RCI aka Endless Vacation Rentals - the Enron of timeshares, utilizing the elusive and untraceable Summit Vacation Corp. - a professional scam group based in Pittsfield, Mass. If someone knows more, please enlighten me!!

Here are my marketing tips of the hour - fresh from the disrespectful, rude, and intolerable behavior of the staff at the North Star Lodge/Inn/Resort in Killington, Vermont:

1.) When conducting business in small locales like Vermont, do not hire sneaky out-of-state entities to do your dirty laundry. Instead, just leave Vermont all together and go do your dirty business in other states.
2.) Do not judge a book by its cover. You never know who wears farmer clothes and is a millionaire, who wears business suits and is in credit card debt and just filed Chapter 11, who wears hippie clothes and owns a business, who dresses like a Nascar fanatic and is undercover, who looks like a soccer mom and is a drug dealer, who walks funny but invented the latest electronic gadget, or who is a bouncy sometimes frazzled looking 30-something and is really a publicist!
3.) Do onto others - do I really need to go there? After this weekend apparently I do. Treat others kindly, have compassion, and don't be a jerk.
4.) If you're running a marketing program and say it's to spread the word, be positive and let the positive word be spread. If you are running a marketing program to sell something directly - be open and honest about what you're selling and don't use asinine gimics.
5.) Never underestimate the power of PR, the power of the press, and the power of the internet.
6.) Always google search new people you are about to deal with and know who you are dealing with so you are not caught off guard.
7.) Understand your market, be in honest touch with your product, and don't try to be something you are not.
8.) Don't take out your own inadequacies or your failing marketing campaign on others, just stop and go at if from a different angle with a different approach.
9.) Do not inappropriately use contests to your advantage. One well run true and real contest will garner enough PR to pay for the sales you could cheaply get out of a potentially fraudulent operation.
10.) Do not ever go to the North Star Lodge or recommend a friend to go there, and if playing with timeshares, be very, very cautious with RCI - Endless Vacation Rentals.