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Walking for exercise was the most popular activity in terms of number of participants and was in the top ten when it came to year over year growth on our list of top leisure activities. Given an aging population, and a tough economy, it’s not surprising that walking is a popular leisure activity. To provide some context, in 2008, there were 96.6 million people who participated in ‘walking’ compared to ‘golf’ which had 25.5 million participants. Also, the number of walkers in 2008 was 11% higher than it was in 2007 which saw 89.9 million participants.

This will be a two part series. In this post, I’m going to look at:

• Demographic & Gender Trends for Walking in the USA
• Footwear Spending by Category
• Walking Shoe Purchasers by Age & Gender
• Top Search Keywords

The second post will focus on stock photography related to ‘walking’ and will link back to this one.

Participation by Gender

Source: NSGA, Statistical Abstract of the USA

Participation by Age

Source: NSGA, Statistical Abstract of the USA

Walking as a means of exercise clearly skews older (49% of participants 45 or older) and female (62.5% female). This data is also supported by the footwear spending data as you’ll see below.

Footwear Spending by Type of Shoe

Walking shoes accounted for 33% of the $12.5 billion dollars spent on footwear in 2007 (data for 2008 were projected to be similar and 2009 data are not available yet but if anything, I’d expect this to be more pronounced.)

Walking shoe Purchasers by Gender & Age

Digging into the walking shoe purchasers show that the same trends apply as the overall participation in walking. 45-64 is the biggest age group and the percentage of female users is identical to the percentage of female walkers.

Search Trends for Walking & Walking Shoes

The chart below shows data from Google Insights for ‘exercise walking’ and ‘walking shoes’ from 2008 to 2010.

There isn’t much seasonality, but ‘walking shoes’ are searched for 5 times more often than ‘exercise walking.’ This surprised me initially, but intuitively it makes sense that people would be searching for ‘walking shoes’ as opposed to for ‘exercise walking.’ The same caveats as those in our comments on running shoes apply – be careful of trademarked designs & logos.

Top Searches Related to ‘Exercise Walking’

Conclusions

• Walking for exercise is the top leisure activity in the USA in terms of participation with close to 100 million people taking part in 2008!
• Demographically speaking, the participants skew older & female; the top age segment is 45-64 years old.
• Walking shoes represent the top footwear category in the USA and the demographics (not surprisingly) map closely with walkers.
• ‘Walking shoes’ should be part of your keywording strategy since they are a high volume search query
• Top related keywords are: “exercise, weight loss, calories, walking shoes”

I think the demographic trends around walking are fairly clear. This lines up well with general demand for imagery around ‘active seniors’ and this is something I’ll dive into in more detail in the second part of this post. Stay tuned and comments and feedback are always appreciated!

Summer is just around the corner, from a shoot planning perspective.

Since the time to begin uploading seasonal images seems to be 2-3 months ahead of an event (see our Thanksgiving & Easter posts) and shoots need to happen well before that, we will be profiling the top leisure activities in the USA early. Similar to our hunting post, I’ll be looking at search trends and highlighting the best-selling stock images associated with those activities.

When deciding to post a list of the top activities, the metric you choose to rank on is important. I’ve included the fastest growing as well as those with the highest number of participants in this post. (We looked at the top activities based on consumer spending last week.)

Fastest Growing Leisure Activities in the USA

The chart below shows the ten fastest growing leisure activities in the USA, measured by the % increase in participation from 2007 to 2008 (2009 data is not yet available.) These data are from the National Sporting Goods Association.

Since growth rates by themselves aren’t meaningful, I’ve included a data table which lists the number of participants and the number added from 2007 to 2008. The data are ranked by growth rate and the top activities in terms of participation are highlighted in bold.

• Running didn’t surprise me much since it’s so easy to get started.
• I was a little surprised by the popularity of ‘exercising with equipment’ especially as it is not the same as ‘working out at a club/gym’ as you can see from the table below.
• Snowboarding grew a lot, but off a small base.
• Even though baseball may be ‘America’s pastime,’ soccer had more participants.
• Yoga was bigger and grew faster than baseball or soccer.

Top 10 Leisure Activities Based on Number of Participants in 2008

• I didn’t expect bowling or fishing to be that high on the list (probably my own biases at work.)
• I think age segmentation will be important. For example, I expect the participation in walking to skew older. (I’ll try and address this aspect in the individual sport profiles.)

Stay Tuned (And Share What You’re Interested In)

Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing activity profiles regularly. I’ll be focusing on the fastest-growing list but will leave out winter sports for now since they won’t be of much use from a shoot planning perspective. (If you’d like to see them anyway, let me know.)

As always, if there’s a specific topic you’d like to see covered, please let me know and I’ll see if we can work it in.

I’m planning a series of posts on summer sports and activities (and related keywords etc) to help with your shoot planning.

While doing some background research I came across a couple of very interesting data repositories at the Census & The National Association of Sporting Goods Manufacturers.

I was playing around with the data for consumer spending and participation and decided to run a quick analysis on the average spending per participant for each of the Top 5. The data blew me away.

Top 5 Recreational Pursuits by Spending

NB: Spending & Participation Data in Millions; Source: NSGA

The Fastest Growing of the Top 5? Hunting…

Source: NSGA

Things That Surprised Me

To be honest, almost everything about the data above surprised me. I expected golf to top the total and per person spending charts and I definitely didn’t expect hunting to be on this chart in the first place.

Based on my surprise around hunting & golf, I decided to do a quick search on iStock & Getty Images to see how many results showed up for stock imagery around these subjects. I expected more golf than hunting shots all around.

At iStock, there were 16,576 images returned for a search for ‘golf’ and 6,806 images returned for a search on ‘hunting’. So far so good. I expected to see the same thing at Getty but it was not to be. Getty returns 10,291 results for golf and 12,990 results for hunting. I’m not really sure how to explain the fact that there are more hunting images at Getty but if you have some ideas, please share them in the comments.

Conclusions & Observations

I’m going to have to add hunting to the list of activities that I profile over the next few weeks!

If you believe that how much someone is willing to spend on something is a proxy for how much a marketer will spend to sell them that something, then hunting is clearly an important activity to study.

A Small Request

If you’ve read this far and you found this post interesting, please tweet about it, follow us on twitter, or leave a comment on our blog. In return, I will contact you to get your vote on which activities you’d like to see us profile in our sports/leisure series.

If you help us share our content, the least we can do is make sure we listen when figuring out what to write about next. (Of course, if you just write to me, I will listen anyway, but that is neither here nor there.)

Thanks for reading this far.