Untapped Brand Personas: Your Outdoor Industry PR Team
By: Cory Van Auken
Outdoor, Hunting, Fishing, and Endurance brands, hear us out: the Darby Comm staff represents the perfect micro–focus group. We are your brand personas. We buy your stuff, abuse it, argue about it, and then buy it again if it earns our respect.
This crew of 11 spans Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z. We’re all gear-heads in our own right, spend our free time recreating outside, and understand how the media ecosystem works. We’re discerning yet susceptible to honest marketing.
Spend a day in our office, and you’ll find everyone has a specialty. Tim squeezes in casual 10-mile lunch runs while training for ultras. Kaleb conducts meetings from his tree stand, and Coral is ready to take on the day after finishing a killer HIIT workout at the Y.
These pursuits are core to why we work in the outdoor industry in the first place. Angie logs miles on her mountain bike. Katie hikes to the perfect overlook to pitch a tent. Suz hauls kids up Bearwallow Mountain. Maggie sight-casts for reds. Abby and Stacy hit a tight spruce-lined five-mile loop. Gordon squeezes in a quick post-work nine before the sun goes down.
Together, we form a tidy mini-ecosystem of outdoor consumers, each with distinct habits, preferences, and opinions. So, pick our brains. We’ve spent an embarrassing amount of money on gear, and we have…opinions.
The Experiment:
Whenever we start working with a new brand, we begin with education: target audiences, what they care about, and how they behave. Brand personas are part of that process. And more often than not, those personas look suspiciously like someone sitting in our office. So, for fun (and science), we decided to test this theory. What if we actually modeled personas after ourselves?
Like good faux social scientists, we collected data. We all partook in a lengthy, anonymous survey on our content consumption habits, interests, product discovery, purchase journeys, and buying values. The results were predictable in some ways, surprisingly nuanced in others.
Media Consumption
Ninety percent of our team uses Instagram, YouTube, and Reddit daily. Only 36% use Facebook or TikTok, with the split largely generational.
When it comes to brand and product discovery, Instagram dominates casual discovery, but the underdogs, ‘Word of mouth’ and ‘Podcasts,’ capture 2nd and 3rd place to complete the podium. But post-discovery research…that lives elsewhere.
Once curiosity is sparked, we stop doomscrolling and enter research mode. According to the data, our team heads straight to review articles, dives into YouTube to watch gear take a beating, and scours Reddit to read strangers with nothing to gain bicker over the best insulated down jacket. Man, we love a good subreddit gear debate.
Brand Trust
We’re a skeptical bunch. Probably an occupational hazard. For our team, trust is built through respected familiarity. Which sounds nice, but what does it actually mean?
According to the survey, our trust is earned through repeated exposure in media we respect and validation from people we already believe in—like friends, peers, and credible third-party voices. “Expert validation” and “friends/word-of-mouth” are the strongest credibility signals we’ve got.
When it comes time to actually buy something, most of us fall squarely into the need-driven and research-heavy camp. The most common trigger? I’ve researched this thing forever. We don’t impulse-buy gear. We research it. Relentlessly.
And the fastest way to lose us? Marketing that feels forced. Too influencer-heavy, everything sponsored. The moment it smells like a coordinated performance rather than an honest recommendation, our spidey senses tingle, and the walls go up.
Darby Brand Personas
So what happens when you package this together? Meet our 3 Darby Communications brand personas, modeled after our very own gear-obsessed, Reddit-lurking, outdoor/endurance/hunting/fishing team of great humans.
Sarah, The Gen X Optimizer
Sarah’s already been on a trail run, hit the gym, or walked the dog before most people find their keys. She shows up to the office caffeinated, organized, and armed with a to-do list and a podcast recommendation. Need an after-work taco or brewery suggestion? Sarah knows the real hole-in-the-wall that hasn’t been ‘discovered.’ Yet.
Her gear sits at the intersection of function and design. Patagonia isn’t just a fleece; it’s a values statement, and she’ll gladly pay a premium for the perfect performance sock.
Sarah peruses Instagram and stays loosely aware of trends, thanks in part to her Gen Z kids. Brand and product discovery often happens through casual scrolling on social or a run-in with an old friend, but research is the main event. She’ll Google editorial reviews, then head straight to Reddit for an unfiltered debate among strangers, arguing about the merits of 29” versus 27.5” mountain bike wheels.
Want to nudge her into purchase mode? Skip the glossy campaigns and empty brand-speak blasted out by influencers with massive followings. That’s a hard pass for Sarah. Instead, opt for a straight-shooting product review from a seasoned writer, or a gritty founder story that says something real.
Emma, The Millennial Culture-Maker
Emma is a D.I.N.K with a million ways to fill up her free time. Work hours are for high achievement. Weekends are for unwinding in the woods or scoring something vintage ‘with a past’ from her favorite thrift shop. Food is to be savored, and Saturday plans involve at least one meal that’s been revered by the local food blogger.
Her Instagram is a journal of her out-of-office life, while YouTube is her tool for researching that house project she’s ready to tackle.
Emma’s gear is an extension of her personality, and the brands she wears are subtle flexes that signal she pays attention to the outdoor industry landscape. If Field Mag and her favorite Substacker are waxing poetic about a new brand of bespoke jorts, Emma’s already been wearing them for three months.
How did she learn about them? That one friend, the early adopter, who’s been rocking Blundstones as their daily driver since 2014. When it’s time to dig deeper, Emma does a quick Instagram vibe check, then moves to her research channels. YouTube is a must, where the glossy aesthetic gives way to real-world testing and use.
Sure, she’ll purchase from an Instagram ad, but rest assured, by the time she clicks “Buy,” she’s been living in the brand’s remarketing funnel for months.
Jake, the Gen-Z Sportsman
Jake has opinions because his gear gets absolutely worked. He’s a brand loyalist and a certified gear snob, but he’s earned it. Jake lives for the pursuit, with a permanent sunglass tan to prove it. Fishing mornings turn into fishing afternoons, capped with big dinners and a table full of friends who won’t roll their eyes when he launches into a take on forward-facing sonar.
Discovery happens the usual way: scrolling Instagram and TikTok, or catching a clip from his favorite podcaster on YouTube. But curiosity triggers a process. First, texts to his fishing-buddies group chat. Then the deep dive. He starts in the hyper-specific subreddit he’s been lurking in for years, moves on to YouTube comparison videos, and finishes by devouring every customer review he can find.
Jake doesn’t hesitate because gear is expensive; he hesitates because it has to be the best. Absolute certainty is the goal. Sometimes that means the season changes before he decides, and his online cart sits untouched for eight months while his attention shifts to hunting season. When he finally pulls the trigger, though, it’s not impulse. It’s conviction.
Conclusion
Sarah, Emma, and Jake aren’t theoretical. They’re us. This little experiment didn’t break new ground; it just confirmed what we already knew: the Darby Comm crew is the outdoor consumer, or at least a pretty honest cross-section of it.
And if we can be so bold as to speak to outdoor brands on behalf of all outdoor industry consumers for a moment, it’s clear we value unbiased information from respected media, friends, peers, and…Redditors, the true unsung heroes. We want honest marketing and for our gear to do exactly what it’s designed to do. Earn our trust, and you won’t just make a sale, you’ll gain a loyal brand advocate.
So, outdoor industry brands, if you’re reading this—don’t be afraid to ask questions and pick our brains about how we research and buy gear; we’d LOVE to share our opinions.