The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission filed charges against Rodney Edward Smith, 39, of Chatsworth, Georgia, for orchestrating a fraud scheme targeting Florida hunters. Smith posted fraudulent hunting lease advertisements and collected deposits from victims across 15 Florida counties, facing four felony counts including fraudulently offering property for lease.
Montana's new block management enforcement network, created through Senate Bill 441 introduced by Senator Denley Loge, allows landowners to opt-in to reinforce hunter compliance. Violations result in progressive restrictions from all participating BMAs, with over 830 landowners across 550 BMAs enrolled for the 2026 season.
The Alternative Mass Media Conference planning committee announced speakers and topics for the pre-conference event held prior to the 41st annual Gun Rights Policy Conference, co-hosted by the Second Amendment Foundation and Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, September 25-27 in Dallas.
The North Dakota Game and Fish Department reminds anglers to follow state regulations during late-summer fishing season, including immediately releasing caught fish except for brief measurement or photography. The Department urges anglers to keep fish caught from depths greater than 25 feet due to barotrauma risks.
Nebraska's state recreation areas open to hunting on Sept. 8, with several seasons beginning Sept. 1 including archery deer, dove, grouse, and early teal. A Nebraska Vehicle Park Entry Permit is required, and standard hunting regulations apply with restrictions near public facilities.
FWP wildlife stewardship outreach specialist Danielle Oyler explains how hunters can learn to call elk using their natural voice instead of electronic devices. The technique involves mastering cow calls, calf calls, and other elk sounds by listening to real animals and practicing regularly, with benefits including reduced gear and improved hunting success.
Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks has divided SPP Montana, LLC's Block Management Areas in northwest Montana into three distinct BMAs for 2026: SPP MT - Ashley Lake, SPP MT - McGinnis, and SPP MT - North. Each area requires specific season-long hang tags or written permission, with updated maps and rules available on the FWP website.
Montana Hunter Education classes are scheduled in Terry in August and Glendive and Lame Deer in September. Anyone born after January 1, 1985 must complete a Hunter Education course to hunt in Montana. Contact Jeremy Fowler, Trent Hansen, or Ed Joiner for registration details at their respective locations.
Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks' Hunter Landowner Stewardship Program is a voluntary online educational initiative featuring five videos on hunter ethics and landowner relations. The program, managed by Francis Reishus, helps new and experienced hunters learn responsible behavior, with participants entering the Protect the Hunt raffle upon completion.
Sturm, Ruger & Co. and Heckler & Koch, founding members of VAULT, now have live product data feeding into the National Association of Sporting Goods Wholesalers' centralized platform. The milestone enables distributors and retailers to access standardized product information, reducing errors and improving accuracy across the shooting sports supply chain.
Friends of NRA is hiring a Merchandise Coordinator for its Columbia, Missouri office to support merchandise purchasing, vendor relationships, inventory, and sales for nationwide fundraising events. The full-time position requires strong organizational skills, Microsoft Excel proficiency, and at least two years of office experience.
ProForce Law Enforcement is hiring a Regional Sales Manager for Northern Texas to manage law enforcement agency accounts across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri. The position offers a $70k base plus commission with potential earnings exceeding $100k, company vehicle, and comprehensive benefits.
Real Avid supports National Shooting Sports Month through its Range Ready educational platform, featuring world champion shooter Doug Koenig hosting a premium video series on the Real Avid YouTube channel to help shooters achieve success and confidence at the range.
Buckmasters added 32 new certified measurers in 2026 across nine states including Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kansas, Illinois, Missouri, and Georgia. Mike Handley, who runs Buckmasters' records program, noted the largest deer scoring class since the Full-credit Scoring System launched in the mid-1990s, with a final class scheduled at Bass Pro Shops in Concord, North Carolina on September 5.
The 1791 Foundation celebrated its partnership with Scouting America as presenting sponsor of Range & Target Activities at the 2026 National Scout Jamboree. Executive Director Peter Churchbourne highlighted how the program provided thousands of young people with safe, supervised marksmanship instruction while reinforcing responsibility and outdoor traditions.
Field Editor Keith Wood interviews legendary pistolsmith Paul Liebenberg on the Guns & Ammo Buzz podcast, discussing the creation of the Smith & Wesson Performance Center, including championship PPC pistols, the .356 TSW, and FBI Model 1076 10mm Autos that revolutionized the firearms industry.
Avian-X has released a new lineup of waterfowl hunting gear including the BA Backpack, Floating Duffel Decoy Backpack, Floating Lumbar Blind Bag, and Shell Bags designed to keep essentials organized and protected in demanding marsh and flooded timber conditions.
KDG launched the BOM Series Optic Mount, a dual-height modular optic mounting platform with ACRO footprint compatibility and exclusive rifle-mounting support for the Aimpoint COA. The Seymour, Connecticut-based company plans to expand the BOM Series with Micro, RMR, DeltaPoint Pro, and LPVO footprint versions over the next six months.
Auto-Ordnance announced the new 18-inch barrel TAO50 bolt-action rifle chambered in .50 BMG, featuring a proprietary muzzle brake, adjustable stock, and Picatinny rail. Each rifle includes a GPS® Tactical Double Rifle Case and Barrett® M107A1 magazine.
Federal Ammunition secured a contract with Nordic Police agencies (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland) to supply up to 35 million rounds of .223 Remington duty ammunition and 5.56mm training ammunition over seven years, demonstrating Federal's global leadership in law enforcement ammunition.
PTR Industries announced that its entire VENT suppressor lineup is now available in Flat Dark Earth Cerakote finish to authorized dealers nationwide. The premium 3D-printed suppressors feature PTR's patented Purposefully Induced Porosity® technology, recognized by PEW Science as a significant advancement in suppressor performance.
Dead Down Wind has launched complete scent-control kits designed to simplify hunting season preparation. The kits combine complementary products for both new and experienced hunters, with options available at retailers nationwide and on the Dead Down Wind website.
Buck Bourbon Moonshine introduces a new dual-flavor corn topper featuring Peanut Butter and Grape Jelly formulations designed to attract game. The product can be poured over corn piles, Buck Bourbon Blocks, or mineral sites and comes in a convenient two-pack with carry handle.
US PALM and B&T USA announce that EOS suppressors are uniquely positioned following a federal court injunction in Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF, allowing qualified customers to acquire covered suppressors through a streamlined process while maintaining all Gun Control Act requirements and background checks.
Hardcore Waterfowl combines Vermeer-level paint detail, monster-truck durability, and lifelike motion through four core technologies: FowlFlex material for impact resistance, True-to-Life Paint Schemes matching live birds, WhaleTail Keel for water movement, and TruMotion 2.0 for field motion without batteries.
Zanders, a national firearms distributor based in Sparta, Illinois, announced the availability of Beretta's M9A4 Overlanding Series pistol in Nomad Bronze, Lunar, and Clay finishes. The purpose-built handgun features ambidextrous controls, short-reset trigger, interchangeable night sights, and an accessory rail, available through Zanders in 10-, 15-, and 18-round magazine configurations.
Bill Hicks & Co., Ltd. has extended its Virtual Trade Show through August 31, 2026, offering dealers exclusive specials, new product previews, and extended payment terms with 24/7 online access.
Liberty Ammunition, a leading self-defense ammunition manufacturer, will exhibit at the NBS Show in Oklahoma. CEO Gary Ramey highlighted the company's new Liberty SPIKE 2.0 product for .380 and 9mm calibers at Booth #850, emphasizing superior stopping power and performance compared to competitors.
Guns.com will demonstrate its new proprietary intelligent technology platform at the Nation's Best Sports show August 24-27 in Oklahoma City. The free platform for Guns.com's Dealer Network automates used firearm identification, valuation, and listing creation for local gun shops and pawnbrokers. Jeff Tesch, Director of Business Development at Guns.com, highlighted this as the company's most significant technology advancement since launching ecommerce in 2018.
Iconic Outdoor Group, parent company of Daisy Outdoor Products, Crosman Corporation, GAMO USA, and Benjamin Airguns, will exhibit at the NBS Fall Market in Oklahoma City. The company will showcase air rifles, BB guns, air pistols, and accessories at Booth #1103, connecting with independent retailers serving outdoor communities.
Dead Air Silencers will exhibit at the 2026 Nation's Best Sports Fall Semi-Annual Market in Oklahoma City, August 24-27, showcasing suppressor innovations including the Nomad Ti OTB, RXD910Ti, and CT5P. The company will celebrate NBS's 70th Anniversary while highlighting products for hunters, shooters, and law enforcement professionals.
Legacy Sports International, a leading firearms importer based in Reno, Nevada, will showcase its HOWA, POINTER, and CITADEL brand product lines at NBS's 2026 Fall Semi-Annual Market in Oklahoma City from August 24-27, 2026. The company will feature top-selling rifles, shotguns, and optics with exclusive promotions available to attendees.
Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks will host a meeting in Miles City on Aug. 27 to discuss the proposed 2027-30 Statewide Fisheries Management Plan. A statewide virtual meeting is also available Aug. 21 at noon, with comments due Sept. 14.
Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks' Region 7 reports increasing mule deer observations and strong fawn recruitment in southeast Montana through aerial surveys and 40 years of data analysis. Brett Dorak, wildlife manager, explains how weather and habitat drive population cycles, with B licenses reduced 91 percent during drought-driven declines. FWP uses multiple monitoring methods including check stations, disease testing, and harvest surveys to inform management decisions.
One of those well-intentioned but often misused buzzword combos in the marketing world is ‘lifestyle brand.’
Calling your company’s brand a lifestyle brand is a bold statement, especially when you’re not really a lifestyle brand.
You see, the first rule of Lifestyle Brand Club is you never talk about being a lifestyle brand. And the surest way to prove your brand isn’t a lifestyle brand is to declare you are one.
Sure, you may want to be a lifestyle brand and are eager to speak it into existence, but manifesting—that’s what the new-age cool kids call it—doesn’t make it so. You’re just selling customers on a brand realignment they themselves don’t see and probably never will.
It’s Not Lifestyle, It’s Identity
The problem starts with confusing lifestyle marketing with lifestyle branding.
Put a hunter in a duck blind, a shooter on the range, a family around a campfire or some rugged-looking guy next to an equally rugged-looking truck and you’ve created lifestyle marketing.
Congratulations.
You’ve also created imagery that could probably be used by a gun company, boot company, knife company, cooler company, truck company, outdoor apparel company or, depending on how expensive the photographer was, a bourbon company.
None of that makes you a lifestyle brand.
What makes a lifestyle brand different is identity.
Kellogg School of Management describes lifestyle branding in terms of moving beyond functional product benefits toward positioning that is self-expressive and relevant to a consumer’s identity.
In less business-school language, the question changes from, “Why should I buy this product?” to, “What does owning this product say about me?”
A customer buys a product because it performs a task. A customer identifies with a brand because that brand represents something about who they are—or perhaps who they want to be.
Harley-Davidson represents independence, rebellion, freedom and membership in a very identifiable tribe. Nike accomplished much the same thing around athletic identity. Patagonia did it around outdoor recreation and environmentalism. YETI turned a premium cooler into something that communicates membership in outdoor culture.
In each case, the product came first and the identity grew around it. That order matters.
Your Customer Gets A Vote
"Marketing people like to think they own the brand. They don’t.” noted experts during a Cannes Lions panel on brand authenticity.
They manage it, influence it and communicate it. Ultimately, the customer determines what the brand means.
You can spend millions telling customers your company represents adventure, freedom, confidence, authenticity or whatever word scored highest during the agency’s latest brainstorming session.
If customers don’t make that connection themselves, it’s just advertising copy.
And therein lies the problem with announcing a transition to becoming a lifestyle brand. The company is essentially telling customers, “This is what our brand means to you now.”
That’s completely backwards.
Lifestyle brands emerge when consumers begin attaching meaning to a product beyond its functional purpose.
Glock is an interesting firearms example.
For decades, Glock earned its position in the market by producing straightforward pistols that developed a reputation for working when they were supposed to. Customers built a culture around Glock because the product had already established an extraordinarily clear identity.
Today, Glock means something beyond being a polymer pistol that’s available in several sizes and calibers.
That’s very different from sitting around a conference table and deciding next year’s strategic objective is to become a lifestyle brand.
So, Why The Pivot?
When an established company announces it is transitioning from product-focused marketing toward lifestyle branding, the obvious question is: Why?
If your existing positioning is working exceptionally well, why abandon it?
Maybe your products are no longer differentiated enough from the competition. Perhaps competitors have caught up technologically. Maybe the customers who built the brand are aging and you’re desperately trying to attract a younger demographic.
Considering this economy, maybe sales have flattened. Maybe the brand has become stale. My money is on the tried-and-true option of management simply getting bored with selling what the company actually makes.
None of those automatically means the business is failing, nor does it mean lifestyle-oriented marketing is necessarily a mistake.
But the change itself can be an admission that the old marketing approach is no longer delivering the desired result.
For years the argument was: Our product is better because of these features, this performance, this quality, this innovation or this reputation.
Then somebody decides those arguments aren’t enough and now the product needs to represent an entire way of life.
That’s not merely a new advertising campaign. That’s a significant strategic change.
Before congratulating yourselves on becoming a lifestyle brand, it might be worth asking why you suddenly felt the need to become something other than the brand you spent decades building.
Welcome To The Buzzword Cycle
Marketing has never suffered from a lack of fashionable terminology.
And now everybody wants to build a lifestyle brand.
Somewhere there is undoubtedly a PowerPoint deck explaining how Gen Z and Millennials don’t buy products, they buy experiences. There’s probably a stock photograph of attractive young people laughing around a campfire, too.
The problem with marketing trends is everybody discovers them at approximately the same time and then chases the trend, oblivious to the fact they aren’t the trendsetter.
Take one of those trendy ads, replace the logo and ask yourself whether you can still identify the company.
If the answer is no, your fancy new lifestyle campaign may actually be doing the opposite of what branding is supposed to do.
Instead of making your company more recognizable, you’ve made it look like everybody else.
What Happened To The Product?
There’s another danger in moving too aggressively toward lifestyle positioning: losing sight of the thing that created the brand in the first place.
Products generally earn brands their reputations.
Glock became Glock because the pistols worked. Benelli earned its reputation through great shotguns. Ruger built its identity around rugged, reliable firearms. Beretta carries centuries of history, sporting tradition and craftsmanship. Sig Sauer built around engineering and innovation.
Those associations are valuable because they are specific.
“Adventure,” “freedom,” “authenticity” and “living boldly” aren’t specific. Thousands of companies can—and do—use them.
The more abstract your positioning becomes, the less territory you may actually own.
Firearms Already Come With A Lifestyle
This industry has another advantage that makes some lifestyle-brand pivots particularly puzzling.
Firearms already exist within well-established lifestyles.
Hunting is a lifestyle. Competitive shooting certainly is. Concealed carry often becomes part of somebody’s daily identity. And there are any number of other segments within Gun Culture 2.0.
The customer already brings the lifestyle.
Manufacturers don’t necessarily need to invent one. They need to determine where their brand authentically fits within those existing communities.
That’s a much harder marketing assignment than announcing, “We’re becoming a lifestyle brand.”
But instead of asking customers to adopt an identity created in a conference room, you’re identifying something already present and strengthening the relationship between customer and brand.
The Lifestyle Brand Test
There’s a fairly simple way to determine whether your company is actually becoming a lifestyle brand.
Ask your customers what owning your product says about them.
Don’t give them choices. Don’t explain the strategy first. And definitely don’t let the marketing department answer for them.
If their responses consistently describe the identity you believe your brand represents, congratulations. You may actually be onto something.
If they stare blankly and say, “It means I bought your gun,” you have more work to do.
That doesn’t mean you have a bad brand. You may have an extremely strong product brand.
The obsession with transforming successful product brands into lifestyle brands overlooks an important point: making products people actively want to buy is still a pretty good business model.
You don’t have to sell someone an identity if you already sell them an exceptional product.
The Second Rule
Which brings us back to Lifestyle Brand Club.
The first rule is you never talk about being a lifestyle brand.
The second rule is your advertising agency doesn’t get to decide you’re one either.
Your customers do.
If they wear your logo when they aren’t being paid to, form communities around the brand and use ownership as shorthand for something about themselves, then you might legitimately have a lifestyle brand.
Congratulations. At that point you probably won’t need to announce it. Everyone will already know.
But when an established company suddenly declares it is transitioning into a lifestyle brand, perhaps the first question shouldn’t be how exciting the new marketing direction looks.
Maybe the question should be much simpler.
What happened to the brand you already had?
– Paul Erhardt, Managing Editor, the Outdoor Wire Digital Network
