DEMA round up
5 November 2007 – 14:07The DEMA Show is for the dive industry to take an opportunity to look at what is new and explore services or items you’ve heard of but never had time to follow up. While you do that you get to meet so many people striving hard to make this a better industry.
We attended our training agency updates and heard stories about teaching diving and discussed best practice for running dive businesses with people from around the world. We were up early for all the DEMA member briefings about the exciting new marketing campaign to encourage more people to try diving. We listened to a marketing executive talk about how the internet can really help small dive businesses and learned how few use any more than a few advertisements on search engines. That was most interesting because there are still only a few serious internet options for divers and even fewer that actually support dive businesses.
Support for dive businesses tends to be offline. Obviously their agency and their local tourist office (if applicable) help provide advise and leads. But actual business support is more generic and more specific at the same time. We found consultants, media and promotional agents who would never exhibit at a consumer show but are invaluable to the success of our individual businesses.
DEMA show is a wonderful opportunity to throw off the competitive instincts we have when diving consumers are around and to talk and work together to improve the success of everyone involved in the industry. That can only be good for divers as well. We hope theDiveBuzz can be a part of that and we look forward to working with many more people in the coming months.