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About ten years ago, during my first run working in the dive industry while doing marketing for dive shops, I got deep into audience research.
- I wanted to know who our divers actually were.
- Not who we imagined them to be.
- Not who showed up in brochures.
- Who was really walking through the door.
- The data back then pointed to a very consistent profile:
- White. Male. Roughly 35–55. College educated.
- There’s nothing wrong with that.
- That group helped build modern recreational diving and still supports many shops today.
But the question that stuck with me even then was simple:
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- What happens when this group starts to age out of diving?
- Not overnight…but gradually.
- Physical limitations.
- Lifestyle shifts.
- Family obligations.
- Fixed incomes.
- At the time, it felt like a future problem.
Fast forward ten years:
- I’m back in diving.
- Back in the data.
- And the audience profile?
- Largely unchanged.
- Most industry research still shows:
- Scuba divers skew male (roughly 60%+)
- Participation remains predominantly white
- Core, frequent divers tend to cluster in mid-life age ranges
- Only a very small percentage of the population dives regularly
- Casual, vacation divers are growing, but lifelong active divers are declining
- Which means the question I asked a decade ago isn’t theoretical anymore.
- We’re watching long-time divers quietly fall off, often without a clear, intentional plan for who replaces them.
- This isn’t criticism.
- It’s pattern recognition.
- And it leads to a bigger question I’ll unpack more soon:
- If we don’t deliberately build the next generation of active divers, who exactly is the industry building for?
- More to come.
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