For me, holidays and cooking do not go together.

It’s not the effort of cooking which stresses me out when I’m away from home, I like cooking. It’s flaying my own fingers while attempting to dice a carrot with one of those cheap, bendy IKEA knives that they always provide in holiday homes, that drives me mad. It’s navigating around an unfamiliar Greek supermarket with two hungry kids in tow who only want to eat (specifically) Waitrose fish fingers or Raspberry Magnums for dinner, that I find exhausting. And, frankly, it’s doing the washing up that makes me think – hold on a minute, how is this a holiday!?

So, you can imagine how delighted I was to hear about a brilliant holiday catering venture, Huski.

The service is pretty simple to understand. If you are self-catering in a ski resort and you don’t want to eat out every night, you can arrange for this company to deliver, high quality, frozen home-cooked meals (from Cook) direct to your accommodation.

Ordering from Huski was pretty much a no-brainer for me. On a ski holiday we tend to eat out at lunchtime, so dinners need to be cost effective. Dragging ski-tired kids out in the evening is no fun, so we are happy to eat in, but cardboardy, frozen pizzas are not really my thing.

We bought into the service and it worked brilliantly for us, the food was good, but it was the marketing that really made my heart sing.

Three lessons we can learn from Huski:

1. Make it easy to understand what you do

If you’ve looked at the website, you’ll see it has a super-clear value proposition right there on the home page.

“You ski, we deliver.

The food and drink delivery company made for the mountains.”

The page then goes on to spell out the benefits:

• Maximise your ski time
• Eat well
• Save money

In terms of setting the scene for why you would want to use their service, you can’t be clearer than this.

2. Handle objections before they crop up in the mind of the prospect.

 When we help a client to work out the key messages for their brand, we encourage them to think like a potential buyer.

While you are processing a buying decision, your brain works hard to calculate the risks of the purchase before it allows you commit to buying. To help your prospect decide whether to buy, you must address the risks that are popping up in their brain as ‘objections’ to purchase proactively in your copy. By handling and explaining why these perceived risks are not actual risks you can help the reader to quickly move beyond them to the part where they get their credit card out.

There are boatloads of objection handling content elements built into the Huski website, but here are a few examples:

1. A picture of a (rather handsome) non-scary looking delivery driver – in case the reader is worried that the driver might be surly and unpleasant to deal with. No one needs that on their holiday.
2. The logos of familiar, high-quality food brands – in case the reader has concerns that the food might be inedible. The cardboard pizzas are available locally, no need to order those in.
3. A statement that Huski provides ‘delivery to all 257 resorts in the French Alps’ – in case the reader assumes that they won’t deliver to a smaller resort. Verbally talking a lost driver into a ski resort is just too much work.
4. Customer testimonials – in case the reader fears that this brand is new and therefore untested by consumers. Who wants to hang around waiting for a delivery that is never going to show up when you could be skiing (drinking)?
5. Detail (in the FAQs) about how the food is delivered – in case the reader is anxious about the food having started to defrost before it arrives. The possibility of introducing salmonella to a family ski trip is simply out of the question.

3. Track down the right partners to promote you

The very best thing about the Huski business model is that it was introduced to us by our travel agent. We didn’t have to go out and hunt it down. We didn’t have to see a Facebook or print ad to know about the service. The agent did all the marketing work on Huski’s behalf! I have no doubt that our travel agent was paid a referral for suggesting the service, but I don’t mind about that, I wanted to hear about it and as it was a great service, using Huski paid off. This all reflects well on the travel agent.

For Huski – or for you – choosing the right partner, in this case a FAMILY ski travel agent, is critical. If you go down this route, make sure that whoever you ask to promote your business has similar brand values, and is dealing with the correct target market. If the travel agent was mainly selling snowboarding to millennials who want to go to Austria, the promotion would have been an epic fail.

I could wax lyrical about the GORGEOUS brand identity, but I don’t want to bore you (it is lovely though!). Is there anything here that you could apply to your business? We’d love to hear about it!

If you enjoyed this Spotter’s Guide, you can check out some others here and here.