How To Accurately Measure The Market Size of The Scuba Diving Industry

How Could We Accurately Measure The Market Size of The Scuba Diving Industry?

This post is part of our Dive Industry Compass series by the Business of Diving Institute and Darcy Kieran, author of:

We recently discussed the multiple challenges we face when trying to measure the size of the scuba diving industry market.

For instance, we presented the reality that surveying dive gear manufacturers and dive training agencies could never give us a complete picture of the market, even if they all shared data with a third party tasked with delivering market reports. And only a handful of them do it in a handful of markets, anyway. We reviewed why such a set of numbers would come with gigantic holes and issues.

For many other reasons, surveying dive retailers also provides an incomplete picture of the scuba diving industry.

These surveys can provide an indication of the size of the dive industry and its growth or decline. The Business of Diving Institute regularly administers this type of scuba diving industry market survey, and the results helped us reach the conclusions we presented in the recent edition of ‘Scuba Diving Industry Market Size Research Report.’

I won’t repeat the list of challenges here. Have a look at our prior post about them. Here, we want to consider a solution.

To obtain a truly accurate picture of the dive industry, we need to conduct surveys directly with end-users.

In the USA, the most reliable data available comes from the SFIA (Sports & Fitness Industry Association), which utilizes a specialized firm to randomly contact Americans to establish participation rates in various sports and fitness activities. The TIV in Germany employed a similar process to obtain the numbers reviewed in the book mentioned above.

So, SFIA has the right methodology. We simply need to dig further than what is probed in the annual SFIA participation surveys. To define the size of the dive industry, we need more than participation rates.

First, we could establish a list of questions to segment respondents into categories for which we expect spending to be at different levels, like:

Scuba divers & dive professionals
Casual divers & core divers
Tech divers & recreational divers

Then, we simply need to ask these survey respondents how much they have spent on dive gear, dive training, dive travel, and other dive services in the prior 12 months.

This would provide us with a comprehensive and accurate report on the size of the dive industry.

Conducting such a survey would have numerous other advantages, including the ability to determine the dropout rate once and for all by simply querying who has gone scuba diving at some point in their lives, compared to active scuba divers who have gone underwater in the prior 12 months.

We could also identify how much scuba divers spend locally compared to what they spend at remote locations when traveling, and how much divers purchase online versus from dive centers.

We could conduct such a survey in any geographic region.

Of course, the main issue with this solution is the cost of administering the survey.

SFIA hires a specialized subcontractor to conduct its annual market surveys. We could join the SFIA and work with them to establish the additional questions we need. The Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) and other trade associations have partnered with SFIA in these annual market research initiatives. It would likely be less costly for us to contribute to the SFIA surveys than to conduct our own.

Conducting our own surveys would not necessarily be cost-prohibitive if dive industry stakeholders could recognize the value of having reliable market data and get together to collect it.

Because the participation rate in scuba diving is relatively low (about 1% in the USA, for instance), we would need to reach out to a large number of people to obtain an acceptable sample size. For example, if we wanted to survey 1,000 active scuba divers in the USA, we would need to contact about 100,000 Americans.

It may be a $100,000 project just to evaluate the American market, and then we would still want to assess all the other markets around the world. But if dive gear manufacturers, training agencies, dive retailers, and other stakeholders could collaborate, the cost would be relatively small for each contributor.

If you are interested in working on this project and running a test in one market, please contact us.

In the meantime, I hope the numbers in the ‘Scuba Diving Industry Market Size Research Report, 2nd Edition’ will be valuable to your dive business planning.

TL;DR Overview

Current methods of market analysis, which rely on surveying dive gear manufacturers, training agencies, and dive retailers, are fundamentally incomplete and provide an unreliable picture of the scuba diving industry’s true size and trends. To obtain a truly accurate and comprehensive report on market size, the industry must shift focus to conducting surveys directly with end-users (scuba divers), using established methodologies such as random sampling employed by the SFIA (Sports & Fitness Industry Association). This critical research would require segmenting active divers (e.g., casual vs. core divers) and directly querying their actual spending over a 12-month period across all necessary categories: gear, training, travel, and other dive services. This methodology is the only way to determine the industry’s crucial dropout rate and identify essential spending patterns (such as online versus local dive center purchases). While the cost of administering such a large, random survey is significant—potentially $100,000 just to evaluate the American market due to the need to contact a large number of people—dive industry stakeholders are encouraged to collaborate and contribute to these research projects to finally obtain the reliable market data necessary for effective business planning and industry growth.