Deer Valley Ski Resort in Utah is not for everyone.

Proudly.

In fact it is one of only three resorts in the US that flatly refuse snowboarders. And partly by excluding an entire customer segment, they’ve endeared themselves to their core customer – baby boomer skiers and their families.

In fact, Deer Valley has been voted America’s #1 Ski Resort five years running by the readers of Ski Magazine.

It’s an important lesson for retailers too.

If you try to be “everything to everyone”, you can wind up meaning nothing to anyone.

Instead, you must satisfy your specific customer better than your competitors. You just can’t please everybody. And you need to define your brand as much by what it isn’t as what it is.

When Deer Valley launched in 1980/81, the owners (one of whom had a strong retail background), knew precisely which customer they were targeting and the mark their new resort needed to hit.

Ski resorts, they reasoned, were famous for three things beside the white stuff – long lift queues, lousy service and bad food.

From Day 1, Deer Valley set out to have a cap on the number of skiers on the slopes each day (currently 7500), a very high ratio of staff to customers (almost one to three), and food worthy of a Masterchef in even the most basic lodges (try turkey chili, with freshly-baked corn bread muffins).

And, as mentioned, Deer Valley shuts the gate on snowboarders (wrong demographic, different youth culture and they carve up the slopes for skiers).

Over the years, Deer Valley has further sharpened its premium positioning. Drive up to the resort and “ski concierges” race to help you unload and rack your skis. At the end of a hard day on the mountain, valets store your skis overnight at no charge. Knowledgeable and skilled “ski ambassadors” provide free mountain tours twice daily. To cap it all off, the official sponsor of Deer Valley is Cadillac.

As a regular skier, you pay for the privileges. A season pass is up to twice the price of competitors, but the locals say it’s worth every penny.

Now you may say that by using Deer Valley as a case study, I am promoting the idea of exclusivity. You’d be right. But it’s not about being top-shelf – it’s a different form of exclusivity. It’s the customers and the elements that Deer Valley exclude that make it better and different.

Great brand positioning in any form is about focus and distillation.

So… are you perfectly positioned to attract the customers you really want? And are you turning away the customers you don’t?

Jon Bird is head of specialist retail marketing agency IdeaWorks. Email Jon. Blog: www.newretailblog.com. Twitter: @thetweetailer.