Voyage to the Iron Reef: Marketing a Theme Park Ride

I was first introduced to the ride concept nearly a year earlier as part of the Communications Team for the park. During the initial conceptual meetings in summer 2014, I learned of the story and ride system from Knott’s Director of Entertainment Tech, Lara Hanneman, her design team and outside vendors including Triotech. The interactive 4-D ride system would be unlike any other attraction at the park and a unique differentiator in the highly competitive Southern California market.

After those first few meetings, we quickly realized we had a challenging opportunity on our hands. Voyage to the Iron Reef wasn’t the easiest ride to describe in a few words. Even if you could draw parallels to other attractions like Toy Story Mania, the experience and scope of Iron Reef was very different from similar rides. Of course, we didn’t have the benefit of mentioning other rides in our marketing, press materials or media interviews. There wasn’t any record breaking statistic we could lead with either. In comparison, marketing a record breaking roller coaster has a fairly straight forward superlative to design a marketing plan around.

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