In countless focus groups and qualitative interviews that I have conducted with both golfers and golf retailers, it is commonplace for respondents to speak to how “technology” has transformed golf equipment. We need only look back a couple of decades to witness the rampant innovation that has altered the size, composition, construction and appearance of […]
Read More » Beyond golf’s four major championships and The Ryder Cup, my two favorite professional golf tournaments no longer exist. The first was what was once known as The Manufacturer’s Hanover Westchester Classic, later the Buick Classic, contested on the West Course of Westchester Country Club in Harrison, New York. This was our only metro New York […]
Read More » Over the past two columns, I’ve relayed some of the more salient ways in which golf facilities and other customer facing organizations can harness the power of databases and loyalty marketing principles to forge stronger relationships with best customers. Today, digital technology has made this process of behavioral and attitudinal integration so much simpler. Several […]
Read More » Last week in this space, I spoke to how behavioral databases are helping golf facilities and other industry players to better evaluate and identify their best customers. I outlined a popular approach called RFM analysis, by which one looks at each customer’s recency and frequency of transactions in context with total spending, scores each and […]
Read More » Thankfully, the golf facility industry, in recent years, has begun to make great strides in deploying database marketing best practices to manage inventory, deploy effective yield management strategies, quantify golfer behaviors and leverage these and attitudinal data points to create more effective marketing communications. Because our firm’s work extends beyond golf to encompass other sports, […]
Read More » This week in Las Vegas, many golf industry professionals will converge on the second-largest U.S. trade show in the sport at the PGA Fashion and Demo Experience at the Venetian Hotel. Not to be confused with its much bigger brother, the Annual PGA Merchandise Show, held each year during the last week in January in […]
Read More »Quick quiz: ask a golfer why people don’t play more golf and it’s likely that they will reference one or both of which inhibitors? Did you get it? If you read this column last week, you likely saw me reference the standard objection that one hears in golfer research that just scratches the surface — […]
Read More » Perhaps the most pervasive and rampant challenge that has plagued the golf industry for decades is how to grow participation. We’ve been tasked with speaking to golfers — and regrettably, to a much lesser extent, non-golfers — about this very topic on several occasions, and when forced to choose between getting current golfers to play […]
Read More » One of the tenets of good marketing research, be it in golf, travel or any other category is that researchers and marketers alike need to avoid assuming that all customers are like themselves. We very well may also be consumers of the product or service that we are marketing, but we know too much and, […]
Read More » Since my earliest days of conducting golf industry research, the game’s major championships have been an important and frequently studied topic. We’ve explored everything from relative fan perceptions of each major to broadcasting impact and logo development. We’ve looked deeply at onsite operations and their role in affecting constituent satisfaction, built insights informed plans for […]
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