Marketing: Are we ok, or do we need help?

[CAPTAIN SINBAD]

Agreed - but the problem with any sort of communications is that "words mean things" and explorer means "a person who investigates unknown regions" and an awful lot of people are very afraid of the unknown. So, positioning scuba as being "for explorers" will severely limit the potential target audience.

I am in a profession where it is my job to teach Communication Theory to journalists. The area that I specialize in is called "Semiotics." If you google the term you will see that it deals a lot with words and their relationship to meaning. In my class, we look at words like "Democracy" and "Terrorism" to understand how the meaning of such terms keeps changing in TV news to push conflicting political agendas. We also look at how words used in advertising, such as "Wicked" and "Sick" have evolved to suggest something "really good" as apposed to something "really bad." When we graduate journalists, we have created masters of semiotic manipulation who can sell you Al-Qaeda as "allies" in Syria and make you hate the same group as "terrorists" in Afghanistan. It is our educated choice of words that makes you support them in one context and hate them in the other.

In the end ... teach me about scuba diving and I will listen to every word you have to say. Save the lecture on words and meanings because I am trained to sell wars in carefully worded advertisements that you will call "News."

 

[Trace Malinowski]

You need to expand your literary boundaries my friend. Tolkien is all I'm going to say.

You mean that I need to read more than PADI's The Business of Diving: A Guide to Success in the Recreational Dive Industry?

 

[Julieofthesea]

The industry doesn't need SEO... the industry needs more people searching for information about scuba diving.

I could develop an exquisitely sophisticated and effective SEO strategy for buggy whips... but that will do nothing to increase the demand for buggy whips.

Doing SEO doesn't increase the amount of people searching. A business with a website that has great SEO will capture all those people already searching. This is the foundation for marketing these days. I will check out your reading suggestions from the marketing pioneers circa 1960. Thanks.

 

[Wookie]

I will check out your reading suggestions from the marketing pioneers circa 1960. Thanks.

You DID run a dive shop....

 

[Jim Lapenta]

You mean that I need to read more than PADI's The Business of Diving: A Guide to Success in the Recreational Dive Industry?

Oh yeah. I chose "bored of the rings" over that.

Sent from my DROID X2 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Diver0001]

Hello Industry Friends,

I'm working on starting a marketing agency for the scuba industry. I'm curious to see if anyone has feedback for me.

• Do you think this is a service needed in our industry?
• Would you take advantage of a system that could help you get more customers and improve your visibility on the internet?
• Is there a specific area of marketing that is a big mystery to you?
• What marketing tactics work best for your business?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks, Julie

The service is certainly necessary. Acquisition and retention are major issues.

The problem with a "service" is that it costs money and most industry entities are not cash flush. Instructors, in particular, are the gate keepers to the sport but most of them would literally make more money shaking the oil out of the french fries at McDonalds than they do teaching diving.... Almost all of them *need* a marketing service but almost none could pay for it. That's the first hurdle. If you have a solution for that problem then you will retire young.

R..

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

Bottom line, I think if the dive industry as a whole want's more people to get into diving they need to get the message to every age group, every social category, and every income bracket via the mass media.
TV commercials pushing diving.
TV shows featuring diving.
Movies about diving.

You can't blame the decline on dive shops, DEMA, PADI training, or any other established dive entity. The problem is that new people aren't even getting that far.
They have never even been in a dive shop to know what's in one. They have never even thought about it.

Something has to make them want to explore about being a scuba diver. There has to be an initial primer or stimulus that gives them the thought and the idea.

I remember several times in the past when I would be diving up on our coast which is rocky and desolate. The water can rough and can look menacing. On the weekends there would beachcombers and travelling tourists that would be walking their dogs and letting the kids play.
Then, this big diver comes out of the water, all dressed in black holding a huge spear gun and carrying a fish that's bigger than some of the kids on the beach.
Next thing I know I would have 10 kids around me in awe with huge eyes saying "Oh, coooool!!" asking all kinds of questions and wanting to know if I see any sharks! They want to see my dive knife and once had a kid curious to know what it was like to breathe out of that "chrome thing".
They want to know what kind of fish I have and what I'm going to do with it. Before long the parents mosey up and then I have a conversation with them. They tell me about the times they dove once in Hawaii but never thought about diving here. They didn't even know there was such a thing, it never occured to them. I tell them all about the cool stuff I see and to top it off what a great dinner I'm going to have!

This is what I'm talking about. That impression will last a long time on those kids. It did on me back in 1966, when I saw a guy emerge from the water in Monterey when my mom took me to the beach one day, and I swear that's one reason I got into scuba; because I remembered that diver and what an adventure it must be to be a "diver".
I can still remember every detail of his gear.

 

[RJP]

Doing SEO doesn't increase the amount of people searching. A business with a website that has great SEO will capture all those people already searching. This is the foundation for marketing these days. I will check out your reading suggestions from the marketing pioneers circa 1960. Thanks.

Gee, thanks for explaining SEO to me. I'll let the folks back at the ranch know that I've got a handle on it now.

:d

You've reiterated the point I was making. You began this thread asking what "the industry needs" and the consensus seems to be the industry needs someone driving demand for more divers. SEO, will not help the industry do that. SEO will help small businesses fight like a bunch of squawking seagulls wrestling over a single french fry on the boardwalk. It will allow an LDS in California to compete with an LDS in Florida as they endeavor to attract a smaller and smaller group of orice-driven customers to their websites instead of LeisurePro so they can further erode their own business. Suggesting that SEO is the "foundation of marketing" these days is like suggesting that vinyl siding is the foundation of any house these days. Unless your talking about a purely/predominantly web-based retail business who's model is comprised of high-volume, low-margin transactions.

Do note that Ted Levitt's "Marketing Myopia" is reprinted every few years - unchanged - in Harvard Business Review. It is also required reading for all students taking marketing at the Harvard Business School. But what do they know? (Hint: they know that while SEO is an interesting tool in the marketers armamentarium, that understanding your customers' needs and then developing compelling positioning, branding, and messaging are still the foundation of marketing. As much these days as they were in 1960.)

PS - did you know that there's a standing inside joke in the ad industry about SEO? Two actually. The first one: "An SEO expert walks into a bar, bars, bar and grill, lounge, restaurant, tavern, public house, pub, gastropub, Irish bar, beer garden, night club, beer, wine, liquor, drinks, barstools, bartender, live music, dance floor, bouncer, closing time."

The second joke I heard was from the CMO of a fortune 50 company at the beginning of the pitch process for an upcoming agency consolidation for this clients' $2.5BILLION ad budget. They had four incumbent agency holding companies; WPP, Publicis, Omnicom, and us. They wanted to consolidate within three. I asked the client how they could possibly make such an important decision based on a single 2-hr presentation by each agency. His response was "Easy, I will time them all... and the first one that mentions that 'SEO is the future' is fired." Oh wait, that wasn't a joke. (And then there were three...)

 

[SeaHorse81]

"An SEO expert walks into a bar, bars, bar and grill, lounge, restaurant, tavern, public house, pub, gastropub, Irish bar, beer garden, night club, beer, wine, liquor, drinks, stools, bartender, live music, dance floor, bouncer, closing time."

 

[RJP]

I am in a profession where it is my job to teach Communication Theory to journalists. The area that I specialize in is called "Semiotics." If you google the term you will see that it deals a lot with words and their relationship to meaning. In my class, we look at words like "Democracy" and "Terrorism" to understand how the meaning of such terms keeps changing in TV news to push conflicting political agendas. We also look at how words used in advertising, such as "Wicked" and "Sick" have evolved to suggest something "really good" as apposed to something "really bad." When we graduate journalists, we have created masters of semiotic manipulation who can sell you Al-Qaeda as "allies" in Syria and make you hate the same group as "terrorists" in Afghanistan. It is our educated choice of words that makes you support them in one context and hate them in the other.

In the end ... teach me about scuba diving and I will listen to every word you have to say. Save the lecture on words and meanings because I am trained to sell wars in carefully worded advertisements that you will call "News."

So, I think we're in agreement that choice of words is critical to how a message comprised of those words is received and, more importantly, acted upon.