Outdoor Marketing Intelligence Service (OMIS) – an urgent call to action

A message from Christian Schneidermeier, Director, European Outdoor Group (EOG)

I am contacting you with an important update and request about our vital Outdoor Market Intelligence Service (OMIS) project.

We all know that data plays an essential role in our industry, and in each business that operates in it. In that context, it made complete sense for us to make data one of the three fundamental pillars of our new EOG 2.0 strategy.

For many years, our State of Trade project delivered not just useful, but highly valuable, data on the market development on a sell-in basis. However, as our industry continued to mature and change, the demand for accurate and up to date sell-out (or sell-through) data increased. In response to that, we teamed up with Sporting Insights to introduce the Outdoor Market Intelligence Service (OMIS), and we paused State of Trade.

All of this was done to meet the expressed needs of our members and colleagues across the sector.

Our objective was for OMIS to become the most valuable ongoing sell-out market report for the European outdoor industry. To achieve this, it was clear that we required large scale, sustained engagement from companies, and when we introduced the programme in 2023, it looked like this support was there.

In total, we have reported €7.2 billion EUR of sales from over 10 million products in the UK and DACH, as well as categorising and analysing over €2.6 billion EUR of sales in France – with reporting on hold whilst the panel is enhanced. To-date, OMIS has reported almost €10 billion of sales, and the process is continuous with both data quality and the OMIS dashboard improving monthly. This is evidenced by direct feedback from the OMIS subscribers actively working with the data and dashboard.

To be clear, OMIS is an excellent platform and it is highly valued by contributors and subscribers alike. However, unfortunately, we do not yet have the wider level of engagement that we need to be able to keep the project running indefinitely.

We are now in a serious situation, whereby the outdoor industry faces the real and imminent risk of ending up without any valuable market report. Unless there is more engagement from both data contributors and especially data subscribers, OMIS will not endure.

Alongside Sporting Insights, we are committed to keep investing in and developing the project, but we can only do that with the active support of more brands and retailers.

OMIS works and it works well. We have proved that in the UK, France and DACH, and the ongoing support of existing contributors and subscribers is testament to that. Now we need the rest of the industry to step up and back the programme.

To assist and inform the future of OMIS, we have created a survey that is designed to help us keep improving the project in a way that meets your evolving needs, and which does so within a financially sustainable model.

Please complete the survey HERE and help us to help you.

As I highlighted at the start of this email, the availability of good market data is essential for our industry and for business in general. That is at the heart of the Outdoor Market Intelligence Service. Let’s work together to ensure that it continues to be the case for the good of all.