It’s been three years since a crush of new boaters came into the sport during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. And historically, “first-time boat buyers will sell their boats and leave the marketplace within five years, at a clip of about 40 percent,” says Matt Gruhn, president of the Marine Retailers Association of the Americas.
Fear of an impending exodus, especially with concerns about a looming economic recession, has leaders at the MRAA, the National Marine Manufacturers Association and the Recreational Boating & Fishing Foundation urging the industry to start focusing immediately on improving customer service as the primary way to retain these boaters.
“Our industry, for 25-plus years, has been having this same conversation about retention,” says Ellen Bradley, chief brand officer and senior vice president of marketing and communications for NMMA. “We haven’t prioritized it in the way that we should have. Now is the time, especially if we’re looking at a slowdown in the economy. Now is the time to be innovating and taking care of your customers, to really be doubling down on protecting the business that you have.”
The number of boaters poised to be lost is substantial. According to NMMA, more than 310,000 new powerboats were sold in 2020. Losing the typical 40% by 2025 would equate to 124,000 boaters walking away from the sport within the next two years. “Do the math on what if we made a 5 percent dent in that,” Gruhn says. “What if we put a 10 percent dent in that? Think about the difference we can make as an industry if we can just lower it by 5 percent, 2 percent.”
If only 35% of new boaters from 2020 abandoned the sport, that would mean 15,500 more than usual staying on board. If only 30% left, it would equate to 31,000 extra boaters remaining on the water. “I don’t know what the right number is,” Gruhn adds, “but I certainly know that we can improve upon what our industry has experienced.”
Stephanie Vatalaro, senior vice president of marketing and communications for RBFF, says concerns about fishing-related retention have become so substantial that the organization is preparing for a shift in priorities this spring. “RBFF’s traditional role has been recruitment. We run a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign to recruit new audiences,” she says. “The churn specific to fishing has gotten so high that our board has directed us to take a closer look at retention to see if we can support the industry and effect change there. That’s not going to start until our new fiscal year on April 1, but it is a direction we are moving in.”
The leaders at all three organizations say the industry needs to focus on developing world-class customer service to address the retention problem. That customer service should translate not just into such things as shorter wait times for service and better explanation of a boat’s features, but also into community-building exercises that give boaters a reason to interact with other boaters and actually go boating — to remember why they love owning a boat in the first place.
“We can’t just hope that somebody will get out on the water,” Gruhn says. “We have to give them a reason, particularly if we expect gas prices to go up.”
Bradley says the NMMA planned to test retention-related ideas at January boat shows in New York and Chicago, with expectations that lessons learned could be applied at other shows going forward. The idea is to incorporate social events into the boat-show experience, such as live DJs playing music, chef demonstrations and fun options such as wave pools.
“We’re thinking about how to create more opportunities to help boat owners get together, to create more of a sense of community,” Bradley says. “The boating community and people who are part of it plays such a huge role in getting people out on the water. When you’re out there, despite all the political chaos and stress of everything, it’s stripped away. People wave at each other and help each other get their boat in the water. There’s a really special sense of community. Playing up that aspect at our boat shows is something we’re looking at.”
Vatalaro says RBFF is also trying to create a sense of community among fishing newcomers, particularly women, who are nearly 45% of new anglers each year but have such a high churn rate that they comprise only 37% of overall participants in the sport. As a backstop against that churn, RBFF recently partnered with the retailer West Marine to create female-led fishing seminars.
“They did seminars in the store, and we recorded them and broadcast them on West Marine and Take Me Fishing channels,” Vatalaro says. “You could go in-person. You could go online. If you were a female new to the activity, you saw somebody who looks like you leading this and doing a Q&A.”
Dealerships could seize on similar ideas to offer seminars about boating features, boat-handling skills and more, the experts say — and if it’s an effort that’s made routinely, it can also help with a business’s overall marketing. Gruhn says one successful boat dealer made it a point to get owners on their boats three to five times a year so they could justify keeping those boats.
“He did a phenomenal job of building out activities — anchor your boat and watch a movie on the water, come and raft up with people who own similar-brand boats, come learn how to wakesurf or water ski, come and take a class on how to navigate in close quarters, anything,” Gruhn says. “He put together a calendar every year for their [customers] who had purchased boats to convince them to come to these events and participate. He also used it as a sales tool: If you’re going to buy a boat from us, look at all these opportunities we have to connect you to the boating community.”
This article was originally published in the February 2023 issue.
