Boating Industry Intelligence You Can Profit From
CHICAGO – In a special letter to the industry, NMMA President Thom Dammrich announced today that Grow Boating Inc. and the Recreational Boating & Fishing Foundation are discussing pooling their resources to create a joint advertising campaign.
Dammrich stated that this “new development will help us more quickly achieve our critical goals of increased participation in boating and increased sales of marine products and services.”
In 2007, the industry spent $10 million on the four-month Discover Boating campaign, while RBFF spent $5 million on its three-month Take Me Fishing campaign. Together, the groups could use a budget of almost $17 million to launch a seven to eight month campaign that Dammrich suggested would “dramatically increase campaign awareness and prospect generation and significantly reduce the erosion that naturally occurs when the ads are not running.”
In addition, Dammrich said the combined campaign could save the groups more than $1 million annually and generate increase campaign impressions without additional dollar spending.
In the letter, the complimentary nature of the two current campaigns was highlighted. Dammrich noted that RBFF promotes angling from a boat and pointed out that “50 percent of boats are purchased primarily for fishing and over 75 percent of boaters fish from their boat.”
He also said their campaign strategies are similar: Discover Boating was built on the concept that boating helps you connect with the people you care about, while Take Me Fishing is built on the concept that boating and fishing connect people.
The plan
Dammrich stated that both groups need to get many questions answered before a final decision can be made. Among those are what such a campaign would look like and what it would be called.
To answer those questions, the groups will form a joint marketing committee, conduct an agency search during which agencies will be asked to create a campaign, select the best campaign and agency, decide how to jointly govern it, test the campaign on consumers and if the results are better than what either campaign can do on its own, perhaps launch a new joint campaign in 2008.
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