The more things change …
Coming up in June, we’ll be running some anniversary content as we celebrate the 85 years since Boating Business, the forerunner of Boating Industry, was launched.
Flipping through the old issues from those first few years shows that a lot has changed, but as an industry we’re facing many of the same challenges.
I had just read this month’s contribution from ARI’s Bob McCann on “Leveraging Local Media” when I stumbled upon this from the April 1931 issue:
From “Getting Your Story into the Newspapers”
“Space in a big newspaper, with a circulation up in the hundreds of thousands is valuable. …
“The retail boat dealer today has ample opportunity to contribute his share of material to the boating column of his local newspaper. Often the newspaper will print for him the things it would not publish from the manufacturer hundreds of miles away, because the dealer’s news has ‘local interest.’”
That’s just one of several examples. Articles about service department efficiency, affordability, selling accessories, boat clubs and other topics dominate the pages today and then. Not sure if that means we need some new ideas or y’all are just slow learners.
And of course there are the obvious economic parallels, as Boating Business launched mere months before the Great Depression started, dealing the nascent boating industry a severe blow.
