Featured Graduate — Jason Abbott (BRS, 2001)

Who says you shouldn’t mix business with pleasure?

Though it isn’t always advisable, the combo has paid off pretty handsomely for 30-year-old Jason Abbott, a Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management grad who’s found a way to market his twin passions: entrepreneurship and the great outdoors.

Having opted to minor in commerce, Abbott now has plenty of opportunity to put his marketing smarts into practice as Director of Business Development for local creative agency Cocoon Branding.

But given his affinity for nature (and his major in Recreation Studies), it comes as no surprise that Abbott has diversified his career pursuits by launching and managing The Toban Experience, a travel tour service of the province’s best beach and lake country destinations, modeled after the highly successful Kiwi Experience in New Zealand.

“At the time (I entered Recreation Studies), I had no idea where I’d end up — I was just trying to spend my time doing things I was genuinely interested in,” says Abbott, who admits he switched from the Phys. Ed. stream to Rec Studies after deciding the former was too “anatomically-oriented.”

“As it turns out, I’m now applying the majority of what I learned in both Rec Studies and the business classes.”

Abbott even credits his degree with helping him land his first job mere hours after he’d completed his final credit hours. The position ­– as an account executive with UPS ­– was secured immediately after he’d finished professor Mike Campbell’s two-week tourism course at Banff National Park.

“On my way home from Banff, smelling like campfire and the freezing cold, I had my interview with UPS,” he recalls.

“They hired me, so literally the day after I graduated, the next day I had myself a job, which is rare. But I would never have got the job if I didn’t have my piece of paper.”

After a year and a half with UPS, Abbott tired of being a “small cog in a very huge machine,” so he struck out for a four-month backpacking trip through New Zealand, South Asia and Europe. It was there that he learned of the hop-on/hop-off travel tour bus operation known as The Kiwi Experience, and there that he first considered launching his own version back home.

“What they offer in New Zealand is no different than what the opportunities are for tourism here in Manitoba – we just don’t do a very good job of marketing it or selling it,” he explains.

The first order of business when he returned home, however, was to find a new job. Fortunately, Abbott proved a perfect fit with the team at Cocoon Branding (then Gator Designs), a company specializing in brand development and evolution for businesses and individuals, covering everything from strategy consultations to logo, website and product design.

“My job is to introduce new customers to what we do … to make sure that when they’re ready for a change, that they consider us,” says Abbott of Cocoon, whose higher-profile clients include Scotiabank, CancerCare Manitoba and radio station Curve 94.3.

“We fit best with people who are open to change, open to doing something new … We call it a drastic stretch – when they want to evolve their brand and they’ve got the mindset to be more innovative and to differentiate their brand, that’s when they should engage with us.”

In 2005, Abbott hired Cocoon to develop the branding and materials for The Toban Experience, a travel tour company that provides transportation to a circuitous route of local tourist draws (among them Falcon Lake, Kenora, Minaki, the Mantario Trail, Lac du Bonnet and Grand Beach), coupled with Abbott’s expertise about the various landmarks and activities to be found therein.

“Here in Manitoba, we take for granted how beautiful the open skies are, and all the beaches and lake country and activity that surround that,” he explains, noting the service has attracted backpackers from all over Europe and Southeast Asia.

“We also don’t do a good job of marketing how affordable we are from a travel perspective. Like if you’re a backpacker in Vancouver, you’re paying a heck of a lot more to eat and drink, which is part and parcel of the backpacking experience. There’s tremendous opportunity to further attract the youth demographic or youth traveler to Manitoba. We just have to do a better job of creating experiences and marketing, to convince them not to fly over us, but to make us part of their trip.”

Abbott knows he faces obstacles in attracting the elusive youth market (most notably our cold winters and lack of direct international flights), but while he continues to market the Toban Experience to backpackers, he and his Cocoon cohorts have their hands full with yet another venture.

They recently launched a spin-off company called Oi Furniture, and are about to commence production on a series of modular sofas (see photo) that are packaged and shipped in a 30-inch cube, and can be reconfigured into 120 different shapes and designs.

“We just presold a few of these to customers in Toronto and California, and we were recently in touch with the Manitoba government about providing them for the Olympics,” he says proudly.

“At the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York … we had plenty of people coming up to us to say, ‘Wow, that’s cool – where do I buy it and how much?’”

Perhaps not surprisingly (given the amount of networking he does in the course of carrying out his various duties), Abbott credits one pivotal skill – picked up during his time with FKRM, naturally – with helping him to achieve as much as he has in such a short time.

“Without a doubt, it’s the number of presentations I made,” says Abbott, who in his downtime (what little he has of it, anyway) also serves as President of the Canadian Marketing Association and sits on Hosteling International’s Board of Directors.

“Looking back, that’s what trained me for how to speak in public. My fundamental job for Cocoon is making presentations to CEOs and chief marketing officers, getting up there and saying, ‘Here’s who we are and here’s what we do.’

“The Rec Studies program gave me a great foundation to be able to do that from the get-go.”

For more information about Cocoon Branding, see www.cocoonbranding.com

To learn more about The Toban Experience, see www.tobanexperience.com, and to learn more about Oi Furniture see www.ilikeoi.com

Posted in:  Kinesiology and Recreation Management