A Title Isn't a Brand

01The drift

When the loudest mountain went quiet.

Before you can reclaim something, you have to understand how it got lost.

Killington was always the Beast: largest ski area in the East, the 4,241-foot peak, the longest season, six connected mountains. The identity was built into the place. But an identity you own and an identity you express are two different things, and somewhere along the way Killington stopped expressing it.

The culprit was consolidation. In 1996 the American Skiing Company — one of the first ski-resort conglomerates, a company that owned a portfolio of Eastern mountains and ran them like a portfolio — bought Killington. ASC's instinct was homogenization. Make all the resorts feel the same, treat guests as database entries, sort them by geography rather than by who they actually were. Killington got assigned Manhattan and New Jersey. Boston belonged to Sunday River and Sugarloaf. It was efficient. It was also the opposite of a brand. It said the mountain you skied was an accident of your zip code, not a place with a personality you'd choose.

Then ASC got overleveraged, buried under too much base-village construction and mounting debt, sliding toward bankruptcy, and did what overextended companies always do. It cut the marketing to save cash. Branding collapsed into cookie-cutter templates. Swap the logo, change the color, drop in a new photo, keep moving. Every resort in the portfolio running the same skeleton with different paint.

That's the drift. Not a brand that failed. A brand that got flattened by a parent company that saw no difference between its mountains, and then stopped spending enough to tell them apart. Killington had the largest resort in the East and was being marketed like a spreadsheet row

02The bet

We brought back the Beast.

POWDR bought Killington in 2007, and I came on the next year. The mandate was already clear: we could not keep looking like our former portfolio siblings. We had to stand out, get loud, and go take customers back.

So in 2009/10, we brought back the Beast.

Not invented — reclaimed. "Beast of the East" was Killington's heritage identity, the thing the mountain had always been before the conglomerate sanded it down. The bet was that Killington's edge wasn't a better value table or a longer amenities list. It was personality — the swagger of the biggest, gnarliest mountain in the East, and the confidence to act like it. You don't out-spreadsheet a spreadsheet. You become the thing a spreadsheet can't be

Every one of these was built to stop you mid-flip. They ran heavy in SKI Magazine and the outdoor titles, and while the rest of the category leaned on an earnest headline over a hero powder shot, the Beast broke the rules on purpose — larger-than-life claims delivered dead straight, closer to a Chuck Norris bit than a ski ad.

For years Killington had been marketed soft — Endless Adventures, Rise Above, Nowhere Else, taglines that were pleasant and utterly forgettable. This was the correction: a mountain with an edge, confident and funny and sure of itself, built on the things no other Eastern resort could touch — the size, the expert terrain, the snowmaking that doesn't quit. Under the jokes was a serious argument: that nothing in the Northeast compares on terrain, vertical, lifts, or nightlife. And it was never just ads: new logo, new website, new photography, a whole verbal identity. A total rebrand — different by design, made with intent and purpose.

03Act one — the reclaim

Not invented. Reclaimed.

We brought the Beast back bold and loud, co-led with leadership and built with Factory Labs on the rebrand creative — with Buttery later carrying the story forward through video and print.

The look was stark: a snow-white background, a heavy grotesk in black, and one rule — any time we said "the Beast," it was in Killington green, never black. The lines were outrageous and funny and confident: The Beast cuts its stash with a chainsaw. The Beast is what it sounds like when doves cry. The Beast eats Pop Rocks and soda for every meal.

It was stark, loud, and it worked. Leaning all the way into the Beast nickname let Killington show a personality again — flavor, swagger, a point of view. After years of being a spreadsheet row, the mountain sounded like itself.

(A note on the name, because it's a good one and it's true: "Beast of the East" wasn't a marketing invention at all. It was coined in the 1980s by a reporter covering the Killington Stage Race — a multi-day road bike race that finished at the base of the mountain by way of East Mountain Road, a long 8–12% climb that earned every letter of the name. Ski writers picked it up, and eventually the resort adopted it. So the identity I'd spend years reclaiming started as something a journalist said about a bike race. As a cyclist, I've always loved that the Beast was born on two wheels before it ever belonged to skiing.)

Factory Labs delivered exactly what the reclaim needed — a premium partner for a premium job, and worth every dollar to establish the identity

04Act two — MORE

The Beast has MORE.

Around 2012, we brought on Buttery as our creative partner and evolved the campaign.

By then, East Coast skiing was in a value arms race. Every resort was shouting a different metric, trying to out-number the others on price and perks — a blizzard of competing stats that left the customer with no way to choose. We could have jumped in and shouted our own numbers. Instead we did the opposite.

We made the one claim only the largest resort in the East could make, and refused to attach it to any single number: The Beast has MORE.

More days. More snowmaking. More trails. More lifts. More lodges. More music. More skiers. Whatever metric mattered to you, the answer was the same. The Beast just has more. It was unbeatable because it named no number to beat. Any specific stat invites a competitor to top it. "MORE" absorbs every stat at once and dares you to argue with the largest resort in the East. We weren't playing the metrics game. We'd made ourselves the category.

That's the part I'm proudest of, because it wasn't a tagline. It was a system. "MORE ___" was a modular engine that could hold any proof point we poured into it, season after season, without breaking. We ran it about four years. Looking back, it's the first version of the thing I'd spend the next decade building toward: a brand structured to hold its own voice as the inputs changed. Story first. System keeping it alive

We weren't playing the metrics game. We made ourselves the category.

05Act three — experience

From amount to experience.

Then the ground shifted again. Ikon and Epic arrived, and the mega-pass changed what "more" was worth.

When a single pass gets you fifty resorts, "we have more trails" stops landing. Access itself becomes abundant, and quantity stops being the differentiator. So we evolved the Beast one more time, away from how much stuff we have and toward what it feels like to be here. From amount to experience. From the mountain's specs to the guest's day on it.

That turn, from superlatives to the human element, is the hinge the whole rest of the work hangs on. It's the standards system we codified in 2016 (strategy set internally, creative and campaign built with Buttery) that gave the Beast voice its teeth and rules that could survive staff turnover. It's the pivot toward participation and belonging that produced the marquee applications. Three competitive eras, three evolutions of one reclaimed identity, and the brand never lost its voice, because someone was holding it steady through every change

From the mountain's specs to the guest's day on it.

06Act four — the story

Soften the Beast.

A few years in, the Beast had the opposite of the problem it started with. Reclaimed and cranked to 11, it had gotten loud enough to put people off — powerful, but sharp-edged and a little unapproachable. And to most, it still read as one thing: a place to ski and ride, not a mountain you'd bring the family to in July.

So we pitched something that sounds like a contradiction: soften the Beast. Keep the swagger, drop the intimidation. Build community around it, and prove it was a year-round place, not a winter one.

You don't soften a brand by turning the volume down — you do it by telling stories. We built Killington a custom editorial magazine, 4241, and let the mountain speak in a warmer register: real people, real seasons, a sense of place you could feel. Stories from all four seasons reframed the Beast around community, adventure, and belonging instead of bragging rights.

And it compounded. Across a decade-long partnership we printed and distributed more than a million copies of 4241, and Killington went from "ski area" to a genuine four-season destination. Winter revenue up 17% (2015–2019). Season-pass visits up 14%. Mountain biking up 285%. Two NSAA marketing awards along the way — including Best Use of Video and Best Overall Marketing Campaign.

Same brand. Warmer register. The Beast learned to tell stories

The claims made it famous. The stories made it loved.

One magazine was never going to be enough. The story turned into a content engine — a run of film series, each a different door into the Beast and the people who make it one. Not one viral swing for the fences, but a steady run of focused, human films: singles, not home runs, that compound into something a one-off hit never could.

Classics

Short, funny films that gave the Beast its color — humanizing the mountain and its fearless leader, Mike Solimano, and proving a brand with a personality is allowed to have a sense of humor.

Snoopy the Snowmaker

Snowmaker Training

The Weatherman

Danny Davis · Bob Ross

Top Ten Excuses

The Ghillie

Laundry Day

Soulless

Turn the Key

Stairmaster

Less Talk, More Stash

Bear Mountain Mogul Challenge

Mini Mike

Jeff Brings the Snow

Trust the King

The Battle for Winter Begins

Great Moments

Channels

The humans behind the myth. A series on the crew who run the mountain — the heroes who make the Beast the best, on and off the clock.

Grooming

Lift Mechanics

Mission Control

Mountain Biking

Tim Brosnan — Built For the Wild

Years

Why locals stay. Portraits of the community members who chose Killington as home, told in their own words.

Chelsea

Robert White

Randy Elles

Amy Alton

Liz

Jimmi Sarandrea

Jordan Newth

Mazie Hayden

Clay · MTB

Corey Tredtin · Parks

Journey

Home to the Beast. We followed guests door to door — Burlington, Boston, New York — the pilgrimage that ends at the mountain.

From Boston

From New York City

BaseCamp — Pittsfield

BaseCamp — Rutland

BaseCamp — Killington Village

Groms' Guide to Killington

Shop Team Sessions

Conditions

The day's conditions, called by the people who live them. Perishable by design — relevant for a morning, told by a local, gone by tomorrow. The everyday heartbeat between the big films.

Johnathan

Fred — Feb 22, 2019

Abby — Snapshot

Allie Cooper

December 12

December 23, 2019

The 100 Day Club

The 100 Day Club is Killington's badge for the truly devoted — ski 100 days in a single season and you're in. Less a rewards program than a way of life: the locals, retirees, and employees who grab a few runs before their shift, all measuring winter in day-counts. The Beast's relentless snowmaking keeps the season long enough to try — October to May — and hundreds pull it off every year, a rare few crossing 1,000 days over a decade. Founded in 2012 by Robert Kovalesky, who's skied the Beast since 1965. The films follow them, because the surest proof a brand belongs to a community is the people who show up a hundred times a year to be part of it.

2012Founded

400+Members
a season

1,000Day
lifers

Killington 100 Days

The 100 Day Club · 2019

Challenge Accepted

Early Season

No Days Off

The Passion

Not a Ski Bum

Where Else

Killington's Commitment

Spring at Last

Day 100 Check-In

100 Days · 2018, Ep. 2

Kaitlyn

Marshal

07What it became

The Beast held through all of it.

The Beast held through all of it. Through the reclaim, through MORE, through the experience turn, through an agency change and, eventually, through a change in ownership. It's still the Beast today.

The through-line across fourteen years wasn't an agency or a campaign or a slogan. It was the discipline of treating the brand as a system that had to survive contact with reality: new competitors, new passes, new owners, new hands. The reclaim gave Killington its personality back. The system is what kept that personality from drifting again.

And it earned the branches. The experience turn is what made the rest possible: the participation campaign that put 39,000 people on the mountain (Fast & Fearless), the character the community crowned (King of Spring), the culture engine that ran for a decade (4241, named for the very peak that makes the Beast the Beast). Each one is a different proof that the system worked. This is the trunk. Those are the branches

08What it proves

A title isn't a brand.

A title isn't a brand. The largest resort in the East was being marketed like a spreadsheet row, and the work was turning a pile of superlatives into something with a voice, then building that voice to hold across seasons, channels, agencies, and owners.

And here's how far that voice carried: the rebrand didn't stop at the resort. The Town of Killington moved its own brand closer to the mountain's — not because it had to, but because it wanted to be associated with what the Beast had become. That's the rarest kind of proof: a community choosing to stand nearer to your brand. The Beast, it turned out, had its own gravitational pull.

The pattern that ends at an AI-powered operating system started here, a decade before the tooling could make it live. Reclaim the story. Build the system. Hold it steady while everything around it changes.

The operating system has a birthplace. This is it

Unmistakable, on purpose.

The Beast of the East wasn't rebranded. It was resurrected — and cranked to 11.