Adventures in Entrepreneurship with Jeremy Hanks

Audience Awareness

I have a confession to make. I absolutely love Backpacker Magazine. It’s my outdoor adventure Bible. I read the magazine cover to cover each month when it arrives. For the past many years, Backpacker has sponsored an annual tour that they call Get Out More. From the Get Out More website:

BACKPACKER’s Get Out More tour provides the information and inspiration you need to get out and enjoy the outdoors. The team travels the United States for 6-months encouraging readers to pack their bags and get behind the wheel to find close-to-home outdoor adventures.

Each time they announce their tour schedule in the Spring, I look to see whether they are coming to Utah. This year, to my excitement, they had announced a stop on the tour not only in the town I live in, but also at the Cabelas mega-store. This store is literally 2 minutes from my home! So I put the event date on my calendar and anxiously waited for the day to arrive.

I have to admit that when I saw the date they set and the location they picked I was a bit confused and concerned. After attending the event about a week ago, my concerns played out just as I thought they would. The actual presentation was pretty good. The two individuals on the team did a great job covering the basics of the latest and greatest techniques and equipment that backpackers use. However, as I had suspected, the event was pretty much a bomb. There were a total of 8 people there.

I’m not sure who at Backpacker is putting these events together, but it’s obvious to me that they need to rethink their approach and be more aware of who their target audience is. First of all, in Utah, you don’t want to plan anything on a Sunday. The entire State almost shuts down. It’s obvious they don’t understand who their target audience is. In Utah most of that audience attends church and doesn’t do much else on Sundays. The other major issue, and this is one that will play out across the tour events around the rest of the country, is that they seem to have put together a deal with Cabelas to host the events wherever a local Cabelas store matches up with their plans. The shoppers who frequent Cabelas are not the Backpacker audience. I live 2 minutes from Cabelas, but I rarely shop there for my backpacking gear needs. Instead I drive 20 minutes to shop at REI. Cabelas is a store that caters to hunters, fisherman, car campers, RVers, and ATV riders. The readers of a magazine more like Field and Stream would be such a perfect fit to match up with an event at Cabelas.

Backpacker did try and promote the event. They ran ads in the magazine and they mailed me and probably every other Utah Backpacker subscriber a reminder card. But it was all for naught. Get Out More was a big disappointment for me. I had hoped to find hundreds of other Backpacker enthusiasts at the event. At least their magazine still rocks. Backpacker must have different people in charge of their events. Hopefully they don’t get their hands on any magazine content, or I’ll probably be looking for a new ‘Bible’.

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