Benefit-Based Audience Segmentation: A Tool for Identifying Nonindustrial Private Forest (NIPF) Owner Education Needs

audience to inform general forestry outreach programs. However, we refined and extended this approach in a study of Utah NIPF owners by segmenting solely according to the importance owners placed on the benefits of landownership and by expanding the scope to include all NIPF owners regardless of their tenure of ownership. Much of the market segmentation literature (Young et al. 1978, Weinstien 1987) has argued that segmentation according to the benefits desired from a product is the most practical way to understand an audience, because direct connections can be made between the motivations of an audience segment and their purchasing behavior. In natural resource management, recreation managers likewise have been shifting their attention from management strategies that focus on addressing visitors’ motivations (e.g., Manfredo et al. [1983]) to ones that seek to identify and address the benefits of public land recreation (Driver et al. 1991, Pierskalla et al. 2004). Benefit-based audience segmentation is a particularly useful segmentation technique for the NIPF audience, because it allows foresters to design outreach efforts according to tangible outcomes desired by various audience segments. The region examined in this study has been underrepresented in the NIPF literature. Higher rates of absentee landownership and the presence of livestock on much of the NIPF land in the Intermountain West have been noted in previous studies (Force and Lee 1991, Brunson et al. 1996), suggesting that NIPF owners in the region are facing a different set of challenges than their eastern or far western counterparts. The following are the overall objectives for this study: 1. Identify distinct audience segments of Utah NIPF owners according to the benefits of landownership they value. 2. Gain an understanding of the demographics, forestland characteristics, management behavior and attitudes, and learning preferences of each of these audience segments. 3. Determine the most effective communication strategies for conveying forestry information to each of these audience segments.