"Bicycle racing is popular because everyone has ridden a bicycle and the cost of self identifying as a hardcore bicycle type is cheap."

Whoomp! There it is. The precise reason so many things like NASCAR, Golf, Pro ball, even Pro Fishing for heavens sake, are popular spectator sports. They are "relatable". Everybody who has ever driven a car fantasizes that they could do what the NASCAR guys do. Everybody can see themselves wearing a patch covered sponsor outfit and reeling in a lunker bass. How do we make soaring relatable? Short answer: Can't be done with the general population.. The average Joe doesn't understand how flying works and doesn't have the attention span or motivation to learn. If it ain't immediately intuitive, then average people won't bother. So what are we to do? We have to find the "above average" types who can be educated. Those folks who actually seek out new things to learn and do. Doesn't "above average" describe all the people you know in soaring? How do we find them? Same way every seller of consumer products in the world does it: Marketing. Spend real money on real advertising done by professionals. For-profit companies with something to sell know this (or they go out of business). Somehow, recreational clubs never seem to get this. Sure, we try all sorts of things to get our message out there in front of the public, but it's strictly amateur hour. We need to have professional marketers generate some sustained mass market visibility for soaring. By mass market, I don't necessarily mean national network TV or newspapers although that would be great. A tighter focus to the "above average population" would likely be much more cost effective. Regardless, it needs to be slick, professionally produced, and sustained. I understand that such a campaign might be prohibitively expensive even if done in only a few markets, but I think that type of marketing is PART of what it will take to actually increase the soaring population.

If professional marketing is only part of the strategy, what's the rest? I hate to say it, but clubs ain't it. At least, clubs aren't on the front line. Clubs will be how we sustain soaring, but to get soaring growing again, we need to support commercial soaring schools. Clubs just do not have the capacity and steady customer service that can add enough new pilots to grow soaring. Soaring clubs typically saturate their instructional capacity at about 3 new pilots and even then it's often a "catch-as-catch-can" intermittent form of flight training. Commercial schools can manage the "throughput".. Anyone here know of a commercial glider operation with too much business?

So, gotta be some of youse out there that know about marketing and/or commercial soaring operations. How much money would it take to hit one major market with a sustained marketing campaign of, say, maybe one year duration. Ads, commercials, vids in publications, maybe on cable, or on internet sites that cater to middle aged folks with both money and smarts. How much new business can a typical commercial soaring operation accommodate? It would be instructive, at least, to see how this experiment would work out.

WB