The general idea is that you want to showcase that a product will help a shooter be more confident and enable them to be prepared in almost any situation they might encounter. Instead of centring your communication around how many layers a waterproof jacket has, you could list off the conditions in which it has helped a hunter stay out long enough to shoot their quarry successfully. This kind of messaging doesn’t only have to be related to marketing materials in-store; it could even be applied to your staff and how they communicate with customers. If a sales associate can bring up great stories about how someone they know managed to shoot a deer safely after days braving a snowstorm and subzero temperatures in the jacket, rather than reeling off the names of materials and technologies, that could appeal more to consumers who are feeling the pull of the psychology of survival.
- 08/20/2025
- Articles
- Outdoor
The Psychology of Survival: Selling Gear Beyond Features
Price, performance, and service matter when buying hunting and outdoor gear – but emotional factors like confidence, resilience, and preparedness now play a bigger role. This article reveals how retailers can harness the “psychology of survival” in marketing and sales to inspire customers and build long-term loyalty.
Written by David Guest
What are the most important considerations for hunters and shooters when buying a product? Price? Performance? Service? For most outdoor lovers worth their salt, all of these things are important when weighing up how to spend hard-earned cash. However, in the modern world, there are other, more subtle influences when it comes to purchasing decisions. For instance, how does a product make the buyer feel? Does it give them confidence? Does it make them feel more prepared or resilient? Does it enhance part of their personality or make them feel a trait more strongly than they normally feel? These kinds of soft power influences over buying decisions might seem a little leftfield, but they are a great way to help brands and retailers grow sales if carried out correctly.
Mindset training goes mainstream
Most people have gone through some kind of hardship in their lives, whether that be something as small as not getting the promotion you were aiming for, or something more consuming like grief. Overcoming challenges in life increases our preparedness and our resilience. During the dark days of 2020 and the pandemic, many people were forced to reassess their preparedness and had to face up to the psychology of survival in a very direct way. This event, combined with global conflicts, climate change, and other potentially existential threats, has meant that the psychology of survival has become much more mainstream.
Whether people acknowledge it consciously or experience it unconsciously, traits such as resilience, hope, purpose, and adaptability are important attributes that people are seeking out in their daily lives – and that extends to when they buy products. And for hunters and shooters, who normally spend a large part of their time doing their hobby in situations where survival of some kind is more keenly felt, this mindset change is potentially more prominent and something the industry could and should be taking advantage of.
What does it mean for retailers?
It’s all well and good saying that brands and retailers should emphasise that the gear they sell will help increase the buyer’s confidence, resilience, and mental preparedness, but how do you actually do that? Of course, there’s no simple answer, but there are some ideas. One of those ideas is an age-old marketing term that in English goes: “Sell the sizzle, not the sausage.” In basic terms, this means that you should be promoting how a product makes someone feel or what it will enable them to do, rather than just the features. For example, focusing the marketing of a shooting tripod around how it can help shooters shoot with confidence on rugged, remote, and beautiful terrain, rather than listing off the materials it’s made of or even how much it weighs.
Hunting and shooting lend themselves to survival
Survival in itself is a growing topic for the reasons mentioned above. People are more aware that society is balanced precariously on arguably fragile infrastructure, so they are naturally gravitating towards products that could help them feel more prepared in such a situation. Even a simple power cut that lasts more than 24 hours could cause the average household some serious distress and discomfort.
One thing that the hunting and shooting industry has in its favour is that many of its products and brands have plenty of applications in a survival situation. Guns can be used to hunt for food, knives can be used for food preparation, hunting clothing enables you to stay comfortable in extreme conditions, lighting products offer alternatives to the grid, GPS units and maps can help with navigation, and portable power can keep you connected in an outage.
Despite the increase in awareness and interest in the survival gear realm, your wider customer base may not have joined the dots that their hobby is very closely related to it. A great idea for any retailer is to create a small survival section within their store to put these kinds of products together and paint a picture of how they can help with preparedness in case of an unexpected event. Market sectors like bushcraft are enjoying upticks in interest partly due to this general trend of people wanting to be more prepared.
Gear affects experiences
Perhaps the most important takeaway from this article is something which we all already know deep down: gear affects experiences. If you don’t have the right gear, you’ll have a bad experience. There’s a sliding scale from that all the way up to having the best gear possible.
It’s not just about having the right calibre rifle to shoot the quarry you are targeting or having the right clothing for the conditions. It’s about having products that make people feel more confident. Products that will help give people the resolve to push on in a difficult situation. Products that make people more prepared. It doesn’t matter whether you’re stalking deer, shooting clays, or firing arrows from a bow – that feeling that you are the most confident and prepared you can be is hard to beat. If you can help your customers feel that, then they’re pretty likely to keep coming back
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