Your Brand Doesn't Have a Reach Problem. It Has a Frequency Problem.

183.2 million Americans went outside last year. It is the ninth straight record, a 59 percent participation rate, the highest figure the Outdoor Industry Association has ever measured. The industry has added 30 million participants since 2019 and 42 million since 2012. By the count OIA president Kent Ebersole offered from the keynote stage at Switchback Spring in New Orleans, outdoor participants now outnumber Netflix subscribers in the United States.

And for the first time, that record is the wrong number to be looking at. If you run a brand in this category, the number that should worry you is the one underneath it.

Underneath it sits a second number the industry has spent a decade not wanting to see. Americans are taking 5 percent fewer outings per year than they did in 2019, and average outings are well below where they were in 2012. The base keeps widening; the behavior keeps thinning. In 2024, core participants — the people who go out often — jumped by 5 million, and it looked like the trend might break. In 2025 it reverted: core participants fell by 3.9 million, back onto a decade-long slide. Net growth in total participants slowed to 1.1 percent, down from a 2.9 percent average over the prior three years. OIA's director of research, Kelly Davis, named the thing the curve implies: after 30 million new arrivals since 2019, the industry may be approaching saturation, and the job now is retention.

Ebersole put it in one line: "This is not a reach problem, it's a depth problem." For the brands selling into that base, the line translates into a single question — one that belongs at the top of the next leadership meeting: what's our frequency strategy?

The number that should reorganize a budget

What makes the depth framing more than a keynote applause line is the figure OIA attached to it. Its analysis found that a 10 percent increase in activities or outings would produce a 30 percent increase in overall spending in the sector. A three-to-one return — and it comes not from finding a new customer but from getting an existing one out the door one more time.

That ratio is a direct challenge to how outdoor marketing money is actually allocated. The default outdoor media plan is a reach plan: it is built to convert the next participant, win the next first-timer, move awareness up and to the right. The data now says the awareness war is largely won — 59 percent of the country, a base bigger than Netflix — and that the growth is sitting inside the houses of people who already own the gear. Growth is hiding in the customer database. The lever isn't a bigger top of funnel. It's frequency.

The most striking thing about OIA's diagnosis is that it didn't arrive alone. The same season, the largest retailer in the category said the same thing in different words. At Outside Days in Denver this spring, REI CEO Mary Beth Laughton told the room, "We don't have an inspiration problem. We have a convenience gap" — pointing to REI-supported research showing 45 percent of Americans spend less than two hours a week outdoors even as 80 percent say being outside helps them unplug. (We read what a narrowing REI means for the brands it carries in Place Was Never Just Place.) Two of the most established institutions in outdoor, the trade association and the co-op, looked at the same population and reached the same conclusion in the same few weeks: the problem is no longer getting people interested. It's getting interested people to go more often.

That is a genuine shift in where the category's growth comes from. And the brands worth watching are the ones who started building for it before the report made it official.

What a frequency strategy looks like when it's real

Arc'teryx turned the frequency problem into a curriculum

This summer Arc'teryx opened registration for Groundwork — not a campaign, a program. Eight weeks, four cities (New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Montreal), 600 runners moved off the pavement and toward the mountains between June 10 and August 8, closing on a culminating trail "Summit." Entry is $115 and includes a Norvan LD 4 trail shoe. The three-phase training plan was built by Brenton Reagan of Exum Mountain Guides — the American mountain-guiding authority, not a marketing partner — and delivered through TrainingPeaks, with a dedicated Strava Club in each city and weekly community runs hosted out of credibility-rich local anchors.

Read as a run club, it's familiar. Read as a frequency engine, it's the clearest example in the category of the OIA thesis made operational. Groundwork doesn't try to win a new customer with a film. It takes people who already run — already participants — and manufactures outings: a structured eight-week reason to go out, together, repeatedly, escalating toward a trail day most of them couldn't have attempted in week one. The asset Arc'teryx is spending isn't the Norvan. It's its standing as the technical-authority outdoor brand, used to teach an existing audience to go deeper, more often, on the brand's terms. That is depth, productized.

Strava is building the operating layer for frequency

If Groundwork is one brand's frequency program, Strava is the infrastructure the whole behavior is starting to run on. New running clubs on the platform nearly quadrupled in 2025; worldwide club participation rose 59 percent year over year; group activities of ten or more were up 18 percent. There are now roughly a million clubs. Fifty-five percent of the platform's Gen Z athletes say social connection — not training plans — is the top reason they joined a fitness group.

The relevance to the depth problem is structural. Strava's product is not tracking; it's the feeling of being on a team that takes its sport seriously together, rendered as software. And belonging is the most durable frequency mechanism there is — it converts a solo activity a person might do occasionally into a standing social commitment they keep. We covered the company's widening tent and its IPO tension in A Cultural Moment Is Running Toward Strava; the read for the rest of the industry is simpler. The brands solving frequency are increasingly doing it on rails Strava owns — which makes the platform's clubs both the cheapest place to build a frequency program and a dependency worth thinking about.

REI shows how hard the discipline is to hold

REI is the cautionary half of the story, and the most honest. Its CEO diagnosed the convenience gap more precisely than anyone — and REI's recent turnaround was built partly by cutting the Experiences travel business, the part of the co-op most directly in the business of getting members outside more often. It has since relaunched a version through a partnership with Intrepid Travel on lighter terms. The tension is instructive rather than damning: frequency programming is expensive, operationally heavy, and slow to show up in a quarter, which is exactly why it's the first thing cut under pressure and the last thing a reach-based forecast knows how to value. Naming the convenience gap is easy. Funding the thing that closes it, through a hard year, is the actual test.

The question: what's your frequency strategy?

For a CMO in outdoor, sport, or lifestyle, the OIA report lands as a reallocation question, not a participation statistic. If a 10 percent lift in outings drives a 30 percent lift in spending, then the marginal dollar spent deepening the existing base may simply out-earn the marginal dollar spent acquiring a new participant — and most budgets are still pointed the other way.

A frequency strategy is the set of owned mechanisms that get a current customer to use the product one more time: programming like Groundwork, community infrastructure like clubs, membership and events, the post-purchase sequence, the reasons to come back that have nothing to do with a new SKU. It treats retention as a brand function rather than a CRM afterthought, and it measures success in outings and repeat engagement, not impressions. The uncomfortable part is that it's harder to staff and slower to read than an awareness campaign — there is no agency to hand it to and no clean reach number to report — which is precisely why the brands that build the muscle now will be hard to catch later.

The question OIA effectively put to every brand in the category is short. The industry has spent fifteen years getting Americans interested in the outdoors and has the record participation to prove it. The next fifteen are about getting them out the door again. So: what's your frequency strategy — and who in your building owns it?

What to watch

Whether the core-participant number stabilizes in OIA's 2027 read, or keeps sliding — the single clearest scoreboard for whether the industry's retention turn is working.

Whether brands move real budget from acquisition to frequency, or keep the depth language at the keynote and the dollars in the reach plan.

And whether the frequency engines that work stay brand-owned, or consolidate onto Strava — which would make the platform the most important growth partner in outdoor, and the most important dependency.