With the departure of its long-time president and CEO in the mirror and membership engagement ebbing, Outdoor Industry Association members embarked on a bit of soul searching at the trade association’s annual leadership conference last week.
Fewer than 200 OIA members registered to attend OIA Rendezvous 2014 at the luxury Omni Park Grove Inn and Resort in Asheville, NC, down from about 300 just two years ago when the event was held in Boston. Only two members of the OIA board’s executive committee attended the event, which is OIA’s flagship networking and education event for C-level executives. About 30 percent of those registered represented associate members such as economic development and public relations agencies, law firms, investment banks and technology vendors that sell to OIA members.
Like many 25 year olds, OIA seems be suffering the ennui experienced between the carefree adventures and idealism of youth and the daunting responsibilities and drudgery of adulthood. The low attendance fed into a sense that it had lost touch with its members.
Search for new leadership begins
The navel gazing, which is after all the purpose of OIA Rendezvous, was particularly rampant at this year’s event in the wake of the OIA board of directors Sept. 29 announcement that Frank Hugelmeyer had resigned his position as president and CEO of the organization after nearly 15 years at the helm. Hugelmeyer’s sudden departure has created an opportunity to reshape the organization and on Tuesday OIA’s board of directors took additional steps in that direction. First, it appointed a committee that will hire an executive search firm to find and vet candidates for both an interim and a permanent position as OIA’s top executive. Secondly, the board tasked several directors to reach out to members for input on where theyd like to see the OIA go.
“They will be looking to see where the pain points are and make sure we are giving members what they need in ways that can really help them,” said Mull.
Several attending the conference said OIA members need to decide whether they want a trade association that leads the industry, or one that supports it. Under Hugelmeyer, OIA clearly followed the first model by setting out an ambitious public policy agenda, launching a political action committee, developing tools companies could use to measure and improve the sustainability of their supply chains and partnering with a succession of firms to crank out research on the shopping habits, attitudes and preferences of the Millennial Generation.
But few of those topics came up during a brainstorming session held after a lunch banquet on Wednesday, where a moderator asked each table of people to pick two challenges facing the industry and come up with possible solutions. Much of the discussion gravitated toward business issues such as how to retain the best employees and fix the industry’s antiquated two-season business model. Another big topic was winning the hearts and minds of American youth, who are increasingly growing up in urban environments with little to no exposure to the backcountry that inspires so many of the industry’s brands and leaders.
Time to move on
Just as tellingly, there was little mention of the public policy issues that Hugelmeyer spent so much of his time championing, such as full funding for the Land & Water Conservation Fund – a goal achieved only once in the program’s 50-year history that remains as remote as ever.
That did not surprise Sterling Ropes President and OIA board member Carolyn Brodsky.
“While L&WCF is important, there are many organizations doing that and doing it better than we can,” said Brodsky. “Weve done our part and supported that and now it’s time to move on. Members are looking to OIA for other things. There are a lot of issues small businesses are facing and they need help.”
An an example, Brodsky cited two recent initiatives by the Obama Administration. A proposal by the Consumer Products Safety Commission to change the rules governing voluntary product recalls would make it harder, more time consuming and more costly to remove potentially harmful products from the market while making it easier for law firms to sue manufacturers. A proposal aimed at securing pay equity for women and minorities by requiring federal contractors with more than 100 employees to track and report employee pay by sex, race, ethnicity and specified job categories would impose one-time and recurring annual costs of $33.6 million and $12.7 million respectively on employers, according to estimates from the U.S. Department of Labor.
Brodsky said both proposals would force Sterling Rope to divert resources from product innovation, marketing and hiring to wrangling with bureaucrats and filling out paperwork. The CPSC proposal, for instance, would require companies to post product recalls on their social media pages, track how much they are shared and report the numbers back to the government.
“Im a small company,” said Brodsky. “I barely can keep track of violations of my MAP policy.”
Fred Clark, president of Thule Inc., said it may be time for OIA to shift the focus of its public policy work.
“There is a sense that it may be time to move from offense to defense,” said Clark. “It’s been bubbling up for about a year.”
Clark and Brodsky were among many who mentioned their top concern as the health of the independent outdoor specialty channel that has played a crucial role in supporting innovation and getting Americans outdoor to camp, climb, hike, paddle, pedal and actively explore the great outdoors.
“We are very concerned about the independent specialty shops, and I think as an industry we all need to say we are nervous together,” said Doug Ragan, sales director for Werner Paddles of Sultan, WA. “The challenges we are facing seem insurmountable. It’s not a flood like bad weather or even a poor economy. It’s a tide of shifting demographics with some not as interested in outdoors, and we need to provide encouragement like an island of dry land where they can feel safe and recover.”
Underlying the somber conversations was anxiety over the ability of independent outdoor specialty retailers to keep up with rapid change.
The conference featured the usual parade of futurologists, sales and marketing gurus, market research analysts and e-commerce experts admonishing the audience to break the rules, kill the company and forge an emotional bond with consumers to keep pace with rapidly changing technology and consumer behavior.
“Social was the buzz word for the last decade,” intoned said Lisa Bodell, CEO of FutureThink, which advises many Fortune 500 companies on how to adapt to change. “Behavior will be the buzzword of the next decade.”
The rise of anticipatory retailing
In a keynote presentation on Wednesday, EBay executive Mark Lavelle said technology will continue to lower barriers to commerce at a rapid pace, but will also become more expensive as brands are forced to support proliferating digital and mobile platforms and operating systems.
Lavelle is senior vice president and head of global product and strategy for eBay Enterprise, which powers online stores for Eastern Mountain Sports, Helly Hansen, Quiksilver, and Timberland as well as Dick’s Sporting Goods, Sports Chek and owns the Magento omni-commerce platform used by many independent specialty retailers.
Brands are now partnering with EBay to test technology that senses when a customer’s smartphone is nearby so it can serve up personalized advertising in a display window or populate a clerk’s tablet with their account information for customized in-store service.
“We are experimenting with how consumers perceive sensor technology,” said Lavelle. “Is it too creepy, too invasive or can it create a great consumer experience.”
Shopping services that anticipate when consumers are going to run out of certain staples and ship them automatically – such as Amazon Subscribe & Ship – are destined to reduce traffic to anchor stores at many shopping centers.
Regardless, he urged brands to partner with technology vendors to experiment because consumer’s privacy expectations are shifting.
“Consumers will expect you to know who they are so you should test into it,” urged Lavelle. “My company is spending $2.5 billion annually on R&D. Can you outspend us? Can you outspend Amazon?”
An antidote for the epidemic of fatigue
LaVelle was among several speakers to add that outdoor brands have a tremendous advantage in establishing emotional bonds with consumers that are critical to success in the emerging retail landscape.
Keynote speaker Mike Lipkin shared research from Environics Research group, which has found that people’s social values are a much better predictor of behavior then their sex, age, race or income. The firm has found that spiritual fitness has grown the most of any of the social values it has monitored since the 2008 financial crisis.
“When the system does not work, people look for a higher authority so the outdoor industry is exactly in the right place,” said Lipkin. “The outdoors is the antidote for the epidemic of fatigue.”
Environics research shows a combination of high debt levels, long work weeks and the 24/7 connectivity enabled by smartphones has left many Americans exhausted, but Lipkin sees evidence that the post-Millennial generation, or those born since the mid-1990s, will seek more balanced lives.
“That was the most encouraging thing I heard and it gives me hope,” said Ragan of Werner Paddles. “The tide is coming in, but it will also go back out.”
