Blog - Marketplace Insight, LLC.

(Marketplace Insight, LLC. — August 16, 2016) Raleigh, North Carolina —

Industry Growth

The firearms market grew 6% from June to July[i], with the breakout at:

Category Leaders

These categories were led by the following brands and models in terms of units sold:

Biggest Sales Increases Month-over-Month

As is true every month, some brands show larger increases than others, and some show declines. We looked at the biggest gainers as a % of total sales in July (factoring out small brands who didn’t have a material impact on the industry). The winners were:

Handguns	Rifles	Shotguns
Springfield	KEL-TEC	Benelli
Taurus	DPMS
KEL-TEC	Bushmaster
Beretta	Daniel Defense

The reasons for the unit sales increases are varied and can be attributed to many factors, many of which are trade secrets and market dynamics. However, in researching each of these brands and their press coverage in the past month or two, we saw that several:

Introduced new products or product extensions, including Daniel Defense and Benelli.
Received favorable reviews or won awards, like DPMS, Taurus and Beretta.
Others, like Springfield, continued their push into stronger digital advertising and content publishing.
Lastly, there are likely impacts from inventory liquidations from The Sports Authority and others due to industry consolidation.

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[i] The NSSF reports on total NICS checks data and showed a 37.6% increase from June to July. We focus only on new long guns and handguns and filter out everything else (such as pre-pawn, redemptions, rentals, private sales, and returns) to provide a more accurate number of industry growth.

About MarketPlace Insight

MarketPlace Insight (MPI) provides precise and meaningful business insights from the largest outdoors enthusiasts websites. As a sister company toGunBroker.com, the largest online firearms marketplace, MPI has exclusive access to an immense amount of buying, selling, pricing and demographic data. MPI offers exclusive data, industry dashboards, customized reports and data experts with deep knowledge of the firearms industry that help our partners: • Manufacture the right products • Gain insight into competitors • Identify industry trends • Define and target the right audiences • Acquire new consumers

MarketPlace Insight

Raleigh, North Carolina United States 27614

614-620-0480
ryan.nokes@marketplaceinsight.com
marketplaceinsight.com

How Leading Gun Manufacturers are Finding New Sources of Competitive Edge

It’s no secret that data is the new battlefield. The few who have managed to leverage it effectively have a powerful weapon at their fingertips. MarketPlace Insight, a leading source of data analytics and insights for the outdoors industry, is helping leaders turn data into a competitive asset.

Seeing the Whole Battlefield

Just as a military commander must see the whole battlefield, so it is with data. Data often resides in company silos and isn’t quickly usable even by the people who work in those silos. There might be data from your manufacturing operations, from the marketing group, or from finance. These might be hard numbers, or anecdotal stories from staff members, or somewhere in between. But making timely decisions on that data is often difficult. And mashing that data across silos so that everyone in the company is on the same page is almost impossible.

Reaping the Rewards

MarketPlace Insight is changing that and some leaders have started to take notice. Leveraging the exclusive data that MarketPlace Insight shares, ranging from transactional data from Gunbroker.com – the largest gun auction site on the internet – to data from millions of email subscribers, to activity on some of the most premium outdoor media properties on the web, MarketPlace Insight (MPI) helped Century Arms grow new lines of business and increase profitability across their entire company.

“The analytics from MPI have enabled us to create a new multi-million dollar line of business from scratch,” said Jim Drager, COO of Century Arms. “It’s also enabled us to create huge growth and profits across the rest of the company, creating double digit growth this year. We have a certain line of pistols that sold a few thousand units in 2014. This year that number will increase by 500%.

The data and analytics are a huge part of that growth. We’re looking at real data now, not just comparing opinions. It’s brought the whole team together, providing clarity and unifying our decision-making and the actions we are taking. And I think the results speak for themselves.”

How MarketPlace Insight is Helping

“We’re working very hard to bring together the most comprehensive data, spanning all manufacturers, models, and customer demographics, to provide unparalleled insight into outdoor enthusiasts,” said Ryan Nokes, Director of MarketPlace Insight. “We see this as a win for everyone. Manufacturers and advertisers gain a better understanding of their customers – what content they consume, what they are interested in, what media they watch, what they buy and why – and in turn, outdoorsmen and women get a more targeted, customized experience based on their needs and interests. Our data allows the industry to move from guesses and gut instinct to facts and data-driven intelligence. Information like this just doesn’t exist anywhere else.”

Sun Tzu in The Art of War said, “Know thyself, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.” With the ability to effectively compete on analytics, those victories are consistently, and predictably, within reach.

To learn more about how your business can improve decision-making with access to MPI data, contact Ryan Nokes, Director of MarketPlace Insight, 614-620-0480.