What Can We Do? What Should We Do?–Part 2
I already touched on the What Can We Do? portion of this challenge, imposed to us by Kristine, but now I want to touch on the other side of the challenge. I want to talk about the What Should We Do? portion.
I am going to take a slightly different approach to this part of the challenge. Plenty of other bloggers have listed their ideas for what the community, as well as the organizations that support hunting and fishing, should do in order to help promote our way of life. Rather than rehash all of those ideas here, and I think there are some good ones, I am going to focus on one main point that I think outdoor organizations need to do in order to help protect our heritage.
The point I’m going to make, and Kristine touched on this one as well, is to learn lessons from PETA. PETA is everywhere it seems. They are in the schools, on television, in Hollywood, and just about anywhere else you can think of. They are an in-your-face type of organization, and while I don’t think that hunting needs to be so outlandish with its message, I do think that our outdoor organizations have failed on many levels when it comes to exposure.
The main thing I see that would help to get our message out there is marketing. Why don’t we hunters and fisherman market ourselves? I think we need to not only market ourselves, and the activities that we love, but we also need a bigger push from the organizations that we support to help market us. I’m sure Kristine, with her expertise in this field, could shed some more light on this topic for us, but why don’t we have television and newspaper campaigns supporting our cause? Sure you might see some advertising when there is a hot hunting topic in the news, or a vote on a particular hunting or fishing issue coming up, but where is the everyday marketing of hunting? I think a newspaper or television ad that promotes the outdoor lifestyle would go over great in many communities. Why not an ad that shows our love of the outdoors, while promoting the things hunters and fisherman help to protect? An ad listing the positive things that come from participation in hunting and fishing? Also, there has to be some prominent Hollywood or music stars who participate in hunting and fishing. Why not have them do a celebrity endorsement of our outdoor heritage. PETA does this with their ads that promote not wearing fur. Why not have a star who does this by promoting their love of the outdoors?
I think the whole concept of regularly running positive outdoor lifestyle commercials would do wonders for the hunting and fishing community. It would be a great way to counter the nonsense and lies that is distributed by PETA and the HSUS every day through various outlets. I honestly can’t believe that this has not been brought up before. And while I don’t think certain news outlets would be any help, because of their anti-hunting stand, I do think that local as well as national organizations could benefit directly from running periodic television commercials that show all of us fisherman and hunters as the honest, nature loving citizens, that we are.
What do you think?
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Public Service Announcements have worked wonders for encouraging people to wear seatbelts and check their fire alarm batteries - this is a great idea and it would work - advertise a lifestyle!
PSAs are a great idea. I think, and have said before, that we could learn a lot from PETA about marketing and influencing public opinion. I don’t, by any means, advocate all the tactics they use, but they do a lot of things right from a marketing perspective.
You raise a good point Arthur, and it is a big part of the questions I will pose to these organizations when I get time to e-mail them.
Maybe we need an umbrella organization to help band all of the individual hunting groups together. That is probably the only way we could raise enough money to do something nationwide and on a grand scale. Network TV is very expensive, but it would also go a long way in countering the anti’s message.
What would be real nice is to get our governor to do some ad campaigns on the good and posititve aspects of hunting and fishing. What a better spokesperson for our state than our fearless leader? Some DNR PSA’s with Granholm leading the way. Or maybe someone from Hollywood like you said, Tim Allen does the Travel Michigan PSA campaigns for our state. That would be a great idea. Now how do we let them know about it?