I recently attended the RV Power Breakfast in Elkhart, Indiana. Over 1400 industry leaders attended, a rare gathering of the “who’s who” in an entire industry. At such events, there is always a moment when someone says something that cuts through the noise.
At the RV Power Breakfast in Elkhart, Indiana, that moment belonged to Toby O’Rourke. As the CEO, she runs Kampgrounds of America (KOA). But more importantly, she runs toward the questions — the hard, empirical kind that most executives quietly gloss over or even avoid.
KOA just published their 2026 Camping and Outdoor Hospitality Report, their twelfth annual report, which they do with a research group out of New England. It wasn’t assembled from hunches or highlight reels. It was built from 4,088 online surveys, randomly selected, statistically balanced across age, gender identity, and ethnicity in both the U.S. and Canada. 2,834 of those were American respondents.
What Toby O’Rourke modeled for the RV Industry
- Investing in good and complex research. The value of data has rarely been made clearer. Too many CEOs settle for cheap reports that don’t tell the story (and, thus, can’t be trusted) or they think they know it all already. KOA instead invests in research. And that investment clearly pays for itself as it guides decision-making and marketing spend.
- Toby said, “The data is more complex” than what the general reports were telling. There were areas of optimism regarding the future of camping.
- There are always subpoints that explain the larger and more general percentage. For camping, the competition is from a new and surprising market.
- Changing the marketing to meet the new obstacles. Because Toby is committed to high-quality research, she found that the reasons people camp less are not the same as before the pandemic. Yet, much of the marketing spend was focused on that older messaging. KOA was changing the marketing form, helping people overcome affordability, rather than overcoming logistical obstacles.
- She was hyper-focused on finding the central problem. Unafraid to confront the bad news, she discovered that camping doesn’t suffer from an interest problem, but rather a “participation” problem – more people are camping these days. Still, they’re just doing so less frequently.
- She let data tell the story. In 2019, just 12% of people were camping once a year. It’s now 34%. In fact, 2/3 of people camp 2x or less each year. People say that it’s becoming more “complicated” to camp.
What’s still missing in the data (where Thurm could have helped)
Since the project was conducted via an online survey and by a company that doesn’t have PhDs on staff, there were some missed opportunities. A series of follow-up online focus groups would have provided an opportunity to dig deeper into the findings from the survey and explore what is meant by some of the emerging terms (e.g., “complicated”).
Where Thrum could have really helped was by segmenting the camping population through a variety of analyses. Toby presented three types of campers (personas), which were helpful. Still, they were her terms, and there was no statistical support for whether the divisions were significant or helpful to decision-making.
Here’s what I took away from listening to her.
Toby O’Rourke doesn’t react to the outdoor industry. She anticipates it — because she’s spent twelve years investing in the kind of rigorous, repeatable research that reveals what people want before they know how to say it.
That’s not a reporting function. That’s a leadership philosophy.
KOA isn’t the largest campground brand in North America by accident. They are also the most curious.
O’Rourke’s commitment to research — real stratification, real sample sizes, real margins of error — means she sees around corners others are still approaching or avoiding. She has turned empirical research into a competitive moat. And she did it by asking better questions, every single year.
A Question for the Executive Reading This
What does your data tell you about your buyer? Not the aggregate buyer, but YOUR buyer — the one who almost bought last spring, the one who doesn’t know how to operate a slide-out (keeping in the RV world here), the one who’s 58 and dreaming about the open road but hasn’t seen a single ad that speaks to her.
The brands that will lead this industry in the next decade won’t be the ones with the biggest ad budgets.
They’ll be the ones with the best questions who then know where to invest their budgets wisely.
Ready to build your own research pipeline — one built with the same rigor, the same strategic depth, and the same commitment to intelligence that makes KOA the envy of the outdoor world?
Or do you have a new product coming that you want to test with a small consumer base – and do so next week? Big or small projects, that’s exactly the work we do here at Thrum.
Let’s talk.
