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

[dumpsterDiver]

I'm no expert on marketing or the dive industry, but the critical problem to me seems to be that young people are NOT taking up the sport. I was at the local shop's Christmas party and there was a lot of older people. 45 yrs on up. Mostly men, although there were some pretty good looking women. I suspect that being in a bathing suit (around men) is less of a problem for fit women than obese ones.

Young people do cool adventure sports, not scuba. We see very little of it in the media. Look at freediving.. that IS experiencing growth, (particularly with young people). Scuba is increasingly becoming an activity for fat old men, many of which are suffering from an epidemic of obesity and the associated issues of heart disease and everything else that makes scuba diving unsafe, unwise and "too much work".

It seems that the failure to capture the youth AND the last decade which has been economically VERY beneficial to the rich and delivered nearly nothing to the middle and lower class, it is no wonder that this expensive sport has a lot of headwinds.

In addition, over the last few years, reading so many of the really ignorant questions raised on this board by newly certified divers, I also realize that the training standards must have now become completely inadequate for a lot of people. No wonder they stop diving.. they never really learned how.

 

[Akimbo]

To summarize dumpsterDiver: The race to the bottom in training has produced a playground for fat old farts, half of which scare themselves and find a new pastime.

 

[dumpsterDiver]

To summarize dumpsterDiver: The race to the bottom in training has produced a playground for fat old farts, half of which scare themselves and find a new pastime.

Well not exactly.. sometimes they get to gawk at some decent looking women who are wet and not fully clothed..

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

This is what started the seed in the youth of the baby boom generation:


Now we don't have anything like this anymore.


The problem I see is that diving has past it's golden age.
Once when there was one set of gear, one way of doing things, one mind set, there was a cohesiveness.
Now, scuba is so fragmented, there are so many different interests, so many different ways of doing things.
The dive shops run in a parallel universe to the divers that hang out on forums talking about Back Plates and Wings, long hoses, frog kicking and "can you back up". Dive shops sell nothing but poodle jackets, split fins, and PADI training.
The industry now makes cat hearding look like a cake walk.

Scuba is like a big giant firework. It was launched in the early 50's and as it took off it grew brighter and brighter and increased speed as it gained elevation and popularity. Then sometime in the 80's or maybe the 90's it exploded into a bunch of pieces, all of them very bright but headed into their own direction. Now all the fragments are decending and getting dimmer and dimmer as they burn out and fall.

If you want to market to scuba pick one section and see if you can prop it up somehow.

Good luck.

 

[Wookie]

The marketing people would be fired on the spot.

BTW, I haven't been fired (yet) .....

Alberto (aka eDiver)

When more than 25% of the divers who come on my boat know how to use their computer enough to give me a depth and bottom time following a dive, then I'll agree that your marketing efforts are worthwhile, as you will have reached an audience who desperately needs your product. So far, the divers are actually getting worse over the past 10 years, not better.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

There's way more to it than "young people aren't taking up the sport".
There are young people taking it up. I was just down on a boat in Southern California and there were two classes on board. Every one of the m looked to be in their 20's and 30's.
Up where I live the cross section would be entirely different because the culture is different.
Down south they are more oriented towards the ocean, surfing, body boarding, freediving, and scuba. Up here the ocean is rough and cold, so the only people that go in are super dedicated or hardcore.
The other thing is all of them were using just regular dive shop gear like jackets, split fins, and all the rest of the so called "industry standard" gear. I doubt very much any of them have ever been on any scuba related websites yet to get their heads filled with a bunch of conflicting crap from all the different "camps" of the diving world, they were all way to happy.

To put it another way, mountain bikes sell better where there are mountains. Mountain bikes won't sell well in the middle of Kansas.
The same could be said for scuba. It is a regional thing in many aspects, unless people vacation.

Another problem I see is that lack of extra disposable cash available to young people. It costs so much just for food rent and gas plus now Obamacare is scaring the crap out of them as another huge financial burdon. My Daughter has a 4 year degree and so does her husband. The only jobs they could find when they hit the workforce were low paying service jobs at clothing stores. My daughter finally got a job as an assistant at a high school and my son-in-law is a manager of a clothing store chain so they are doing OK, but rent and bills take up all their money. They can't even begin to think about extra fun activities and spending $2000 to $3000 to get fully outfitted to dive around here.

Nowdays we have:

Regular industry standard dive shop PADI divers and all related gear (Biggest group)
The DIR style diver with BP/W, can light, SP jet fins, long hose, and their set of diving protocols.
Sidemount divers
Rebreather divers
Freedivers
Old school vintage divers
Cave divers
Wreck divers
Warm water divers
Cold water divers
Local divers
Solo divers.

And none of them can agree on anything.

 

[Trace Malinowski]

Nowdays we have:

Regular industry standard dive shop PADI divers and all related gear (Biggest group)
The DIR style diver with BP/W, can light, SP jet fins, long hose, and their set of diving protocols.
Sidemount divers
Rebreather divers
Freedivers
Old school vintage divers
Cave divers
Wreck divers
Warm water divers
Cold water divers
Local divers
Solo divers.

And none of them can agree on anything.

Perfect! We have "diversity." That's all that seems to matter in advertising. I have no idea what product they are selling in TV commercials anymore. I'm mesmerized by the message, "Look how diverse we are!" I'm more distracted by the lengths the ad men will go to to try to squeeze every race, color and creed into a commercial. Just like all the cars look the same today so do all the ads. I'm watching football and I can't tell you one product that was advertised in the Cowboys - Redskins game since it started. But, I can tell you that every car commercial did a great job of making sure each passenger represented a race or gender. The messages seem to be, "Don't look AT the car, but look who we have IN the car." Judging by that we just need to show mixed teams (rebreather with OC, backmount with sidemount, etc.) since it might be hard to make sure that every dive buddy reflects a different race when wearing hoods and masks.

 

[DiveNav]

When more than 25% of the divers who come on my boat know how to use their computer ........... So far, the divers are actually getting worse over the past 10 years, not better.

Our service DiveComputerTraining has been around only a couple of years ...... call me 8 years from now

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

Perfect! We have "diversity." That's all that seems to matter in advertising. I have no idea what product they are selling in TV commercials anymore. I'm mesmerized by the message, "Look how diverse we are!" I'm more distracted by the lengths the ad men will go to to try to squeeze every race, color and creed into a commercial. Just like all the cars look the same today so do all the ads. I'm watching football and I can't tell you one product that was advertised in the Cowboys - Redskins game since it started. But, I can tell you that every car commercial did a great job of making sure each passenger represented a race or gender. The messages seem to be, "Don't look AT the car, but look who we have IN the car." Judging by that we just need to show mixed teams (rebreather with OC, backmount with sidemount, etc.) since it might be hard to make sure that every dive buddy reflects a different race when wearing hoods and masks.

I guess diversity is good? I don't really know or can think of how it would help scuba, other than "scuba has something for everyone". It's the applied activities that are diverse, not the race or ethnicity of the people doing it.
I can't think of any TV commercial ever that was scuba related as far as something specific like "Use Scubapro gear, it's best" as an example.
The only thing on TV I see scuba related are ads for vacations like cruises and tropical resorts with about a 5 second flash of a couple scuba diving on a coral reef, that's it.
And let's say somebody that never thought of scuba sees that ad and thinks "Oh yeah that looks fun", they most likely will go to the phone book or look online for the nearest dive shop and go through them for everything from the certification to all the gear. The cert will most likely be PADI or SSI, maybe NAUI but I doubt it. All the gear will be poodle jackets, split fins, stuff on retractors, maybe an Air2, a computer, and the regs most likely be one of the brands that offers FPFL with an annual service. All the gear will be plain entry level recreational industry standard gear. There won't really be any exposure to any other diving applications or gear styles, so the 'other' scuba groups won't benefit from these new people that wandered into the LDS.

Then in about 2-3 years that couple moves on to something else and all the stuff sits for a while till they clean out the garage one day and find it all, then it gets sold at a garage sale or put up on ebay.

Nothing is going to change until diving is put right back in peoples' faces like it was in the 50's and 60's through TV shows and movies.
Taking up scuba is not just going to magically pop into peoples' minds out of thin air, there needs to be a trigger.
And once you get those people, keeping them in scuba is a whole different battle.

 

[Jim Lapenta]

We need shows with underwater knife fights, movies with divers getting trapped in caves and rescued WITHOUT g#dda^ned exploding scooters, men and women who look like real people - not metrosexual models (hell Lloyd Bridges looked like he could be your dad if you saw him on the street) not some big movie star, and story lines need to be believable.

A smart person could make a movie out of Edd Sorenson's last two years and would not have to sensationalize a damn thing to make SCUBA look like something worth getting good training for! But they won't. Because you need to have monsters, a zombie or two, drugs, and the main agencies they'd likely go to would do their very best to downplay the need for comprehensive training. "We know you need special training to go into caves but if you scare people too bad we won't even be able to get them to take a manatee wrangler specialty, so tone down the danger aspect of diving."

Seeing Jessica Alba in warm water gear is nice but I honestly believe if you made a realistic show or movie about NE or Great Lakes wreck divers and how they really look you'd get the average person watching and thinking that "hey I can do that!" But again they won't. Because TV execs are morons. Movie execs think you need Tom Cruise or the new AARP cover boy (Brad Pitt for those who missed it) to get people to come.