You can either complain or do something about the problem: The choice is YOURS!

[Mike]

Since joining recently, I have read a lot of threads, in which people claimed that a variety of things are impossible "because the market is so small", which translates to higher risk that, in turn, requires higher profit margins (higher prices), makes fewer business plans viable (less competition, fewer players, less diversity, less innovation, etc.). Assuming that is true, more divers should benefit everyone, globally and locally. You would see more innovative products when people feel more confident to invest their money in new ventures, you might encounter a different attitude from established companies as a result, locally you might have more boat charters to choose from, more instructors in your neighborhood offering advanced training, etc.

Of course. This is just common sense or economics 101. (supply and demand) some people get it and some people don't.

 

[The Chairman]

more divers should benefit everyone, globally and locally. You would see more innovative products when people feel more confident to invest their money in new ventures, you might encounter a different attitude from established companies as a result, locally you might have more boat charters to choose from, more instructors in your neighborhood offering advanced training, etc.

Common sense and reason almost always triumph over pettiness and bitterness. Good job.

I like to simply share my love for the sport. I've grown to appreciate what John is about by reading his comments and insights on Linkedin and seeing how he conducts business. There are a number of people I would not trust to do this, but John makes a great ambassador. He should really consider doing a segment on one of our ScubaBoard Invasions. He would have top and bottom side as well as a great way to feature an awesome resort.

 

[flots am]

Since joining recently, I have read a lot of threads, in which people claimed that a variety of things are impossible "because the market is so small", which translates to higher risk that, in turn, requires higher profit margins (higher prices), makes fewer business plans viable (less competition, fewer players, less diversity, less innovation, etc.). Assuming that is true, more divers should benefit everyone, globally and locally.

More divers benefits BUSINESS, not DIVERS.

In my entire life I have never said "Wow, I wish this dive site was more crowded" or "It's too bad this boat isn't an 80 passenger Newton"

. I hardly invested in any equipment at all until several months and 2 dive trips after OW, . . .I should add that when a LDS owner believes in the "one-shot deal", it really becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy... If no future business is expected, and the relationship has no perceived value, then it makes perfect sense to take advantage of the customer, which ultimately leads to resentment and distrust, and at this point of course little if any future business is possible.

A few months isn't very long. A good OW class could easily last 7 or 8 weeks. You were right on schedule.

flots

 

[boulderjohn]

Lots of sports are in a mysterious and significant state of decline. Google decline in golf, tennis, or snowboarding popularity and see how bad it is in those sports. Last year more than 10 times as many golf courses closed as opened. I used to sit for a couple of hours outside local tennis courts waiting for my turn to play. If I still played tennis (I don't), I could go there any time I wanted now and probably walk right on. It could well be a mistake to look at a decline in scuba as a problem related to scuba only and not a part of a larger trend.

I am also not sure attracting more new divers will solve the problem. I think plenty of divers show up for OW certification. The problem is they don't keep diving after they have certified. Before you look to anything in the current world of scuba for an explanation, understand that this has always been the case. In the early 1960s, the first scuba agency, Los Angeles County, saw lack of diver retention as a significant problem and created the Advanced Diver certification for the purpose of introducing divers to different kinds of diving in the hope it would spur interest and keep them diving. NAUI followed suit shortly after that for exactly the same reason, and then so did PADI and the other agencies--again for the same reason. Many people today do not realize that the reason for the Advanced Open Water Diver certification was never to create truly advanced divers, it was to try to keep people diving after they were initially certified. In other words, the diving industry had the same problem in the 1960s that it is trying to solve now.

 

[billt4sf]

Over the past few years I've heard a lot of griping, bellyaching and complaining over how our industry is in an economic backslide. .

Is it actually a FACT that the industry is declining?

- Bill

 

[BDSC]

If a show is going to entice members of the non-diving public to start diving, it needs to be a show that will be exposed to a large audience and that people watch because they enjoy it, independent of whether it is an "underwater" show or not.

I totally agree. In my opinion, this is what the industry needs if it wants to promote diving to the masses. I don't think being on the internet is going to be the answer.

I wish John the best of luck in his endeavor but the idea is really nothing new that hasn't already been tried. There have been recent shows about diving such as "Ultimate Diver Challenge", "Dive In", "Into the Drink" and "Dive Charter: A day in the life of a dive boat". I'm sure there are more I have missed. The last one also did a Kickstarter campaign with a goal of $3000 and was able to raise that amount. I believe they produced 6 episodes that were local in nature. Not sure if they are still making any new ones. So there are/have been shows out there that have tried this same strategy. I believe "Into the Drink" was/is actually on broadcast TV. Has there been any meaningful uptick in the industry because of any of these shows?

To me, there are still two big questions to be asked and answered for folks to pony up a total of $18,000.

1. What will you do to draw people to your show if it's going to be on the internet. How will you advertise it to the masses and make the regular non-diving folks tune in? In other words, what's the marketing plan for the show? Marketing it on SB or dive magizines could be one way but then you are pretty much just reaching folks who already dive. In my mind, marketing is everything. You gotta have a plan for that.

2. After the first three episodes, do you believe that you will pull in sponsors or folks willing to advertise to fund the next three or will you need to come back and ask for more donations for more trips?

I think you're right on GrandPaScuba. Just don't know if anyone will ever give another show like Sea Hunt of Flipper a second chance.

 

[boulderjohn]

Every leisure activity brings with it a balance of fun and pain. The fun is a combination of the things you find interesting and enjoyable in the activity. The pain is whatever is not fun, including the cost, the difficulty of getting there, and the less pleasant aspects of the activity. If the fun of an activity effectively overrides the pain, then people will continue with it.

When I was an avid skier, I would put up with the cost of the equipment, getting up in the predawn darkness, and crawling along on choked roads because the thrill of the adventure was worth it. One knee replacement and a doctor's caution to ski only the easy, groomed runs dropped the thrill reward so low that I almost never ski any more.

A recent article on the decline in golf highlighted exactly what I observed myself. A number of years ago people decided that golfers wanted a real challenge when they played, and they created courses with brutal layouts leading to many lost balls and painfully slow rounds. Many of those courses are trying to undo some of those layouts as they realize that the everyday golfer does not enjoy that at all. It looks great when watching a PGA event on TV, but it does not translate into fun on the course for the non-professional.

When I was first working on my scuba instructor certification years ago, I had a revelation during a boat dive off of Key Largo. I saw a woman diver, obviously ridiculously overweighted, trying to swim during her dive. She was half crawling along the sandy bottom, and the look on her face told me she was not having one bit of fun. My revelation was that divers who do not feel safe and in control during a dive will not enjoy themselves, and divers who do not enjoy themselves will not continue to dive. I pledged that when I became an instructor, my students would never be seen crawling across the sandy floor of the ocean, their faces contorted with their discomfort.

Yes, we do need to make a good effort to get people into the sport, but once they start, we need to make sure they want to continue, and they will not want to continue if they do not have the confidence and skill it takes to have fun doing it. That means choosing instruction carefully.

 

[Mike]

So I'm curious if we are all not considering that scuba is not in decline, it's just in equilibrium with the times we live in.

We talk about shows like flipper and Sea Hunt and how gripping they were when you were a kid, and that's exactly where I think the answers for scuba's enthusiasms are to be found.

Most of the real excitement was back in the 60s and 70s because scuba was new. Seeing what was under the waves was newly being revealed. Shows like Jacques Cousteau were breaking new ground for the first times in anybodies lives we were seeing what was under the water. It's 2014 now and we have the internet, the discovery channel, a hundred thousand youtube videos of amateur scuba diving vacation videos... It might just be that the wonder has worn off, the level of excitement just isn't there, there are at least two generations that have grown up differently then some of the Sea Hunt generation, they've had a lot more exposure to what's under the waters, it's not so much an eye-popping, jaw dropping mystery anymore to see what you see scuba diving anymore. I personally just wonder if the numbers we see are the equilibrium that is correct today for the age we live in and the fact the oceans just aren't such a novelty that they were 50 years ago, when we were first being show imagery of diving under water back then which had never been seen before and was very exciting, stimulating and made many people want to explore it themselves.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Once you have a few people you want to dive with, "more divers" is absolutely no benefit to you.

Depends on why you dive, I suppose. Diving is, after all, a recreational activity. Granted that we all enjoy our recreation in our own way, but for a lot of us the social aspects of the activity are a considerable reason why we continue diving. One of the real joys for me is constantly meeting and diving with new people.

The reason the industry needs "more divers" is because more divers buy more equipment and take more OW classes.

The people who have already taken OW are pretty much done and generate little revenue. It's mostly a one-shot deal.

That's not been my experience ... either as someone who takes classes or someone who teaches them. People who dive regularly tend to take follow-on classes, purchase equipment, go on trips, and replace equipment as their skills develop and their goals change. More often than not, those who consider themselves "pretty much done" after OW are the ones who drop out of the activity after a year or so. This has less to do with the products and services offered by the industry than it does why these people got into diving in the first place, and pretty much anything the industry offers will have little impact on their decisions to move on to other activities.

If retention was better there would be only a minimal need for "more divers."

I'm not necessarily of the opinion that the world needs more divers ... I think the world needs more divers with better skills and a better awareness of how to take care of the environment they're diving in. Just cranking divers through a class and turning them loose with poor skills and little awareness of their impact on the environment only results in trashing the very things we go down there to look at.

Retention is related to this ... divers who come out of OW class with solid basic skills tend to continue diving, and tend to be more capable of and interested in taking better care of the dive sites they dive in.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

---------- Post added June 19th, 2014 at 09:43 AM ----------

So I'm curious if we are all not considering that scuba is not in decline, it's just in equilibrium with the times we live in.

We talk about shows like flipper and Sea Hunt and how gripping they were when you were a kid, and that's exactly where I think the answers for scuba's enthusiasms are to be found.

Most of the real excitement was back in the 60s and 70s because scuba was new. Seeing what was under the waves was newly being revealed. Shows like Jacques Cousteau were breaking new ground for the first times in anybodies lives we were seeing what was under the water. It's 2014 now and we have the internet, the discovery channel, a hundred thousand youtube videos of amateur scuba diving vacation videos... It might just be that the wonder has worn off, the level of excitement just isn't there, there are at least two generations that have grown up differently then some of the Sea Hunt generation, they've had a lot more exposure to what's under the waters, it's not so much an eye-popping, jaw dropping mystery anymore to see what you see scuba diving anymore. I personally just wonder if the numbers we see are the equilibrium that is correct today for the age we live in and the fact the oceans just aren't such a novelty that they were 50 years ago, when we were first being show imagery of diving under water back then which had never been seen before and was very exciting, stimulating and made many people want to explore it themselves.

... that and the fact that there was a lot more to see underwater 50 years ago than there is today. As we continue to trash the planet, the attraction to diving degrades to the point where for some folks it isn't worth doing anymore ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[boulderjohn]

That's the awesome thing about competition.

Especially for something as simple and unchanging as a SCUBA regulator, it would be almost no time at all before someplace like China was flooding the market with perfectly good $99 regulators.

So why isn't that happening now if it is so easy?

The reason the industry needs "more divers" is because more divers buy more equipment and take more OW classes.

The people who have already taken OW are pretty much done and generate little revenue. It's mostly a one-shot deal.

If that is your perspective, then I can see why you think it is to a shop's advantage to screw their customers on that one shot deal.

Your perspective, however, is at odds with that the industry believes. In the week-long seminar on scuba Marketing I sat through, the statistics used indicated that long term viability came from an operation's ability to build long term relationships with its customers.

The dive shop with which I work makes very little money through scuba instruction. If that was its primary source of income, it would have been out of business years ago. Its primary source of income is scuba travel. It depends heavily on creating committed divers who want to dive over and over and over again. The shop with which I used to work, in contrast, did not do well with scuba travel. Its primary source of income was gear sales to long term divers. Neither one made much money on the one shot OW diver, and they saw OW training as only a necessary first step to gaining a sustainable customer base.