Characterizing an increasingly diverse and growing backcountry community: A holistic and informative approach using audience segmentation

Over the past two decades, there has been tremendous growth in winter backcountry recreation, challenging the traditional ways in which recreationists are understood, characterized, and communicated to. Best practices in risk communication highlight the importance of having an in-depth understanding of the audience for effective messaging. This research introduces audience segmentation, a widely applied technique to understand heterogeneous audiences and divide them into smaller, more homogenous, segments based on relevant characteristics. Two segmentation analyses are conducted using data from two avalanche forecast user research panels in Europe: The first focuses on motivations, whereas the second combines motivations with other characteristics such as activity type, level of avalanche safety training, experience, and terrain use preferences. Collectively, this research aims to illustrate how audience segmentation can offer a richer and more holistic picture of the backcountry community for the improvement, design, and evaluation of targeted avalanche safety initiatives.