EPISODE 97

Derek We run into this all the time. There are three factions. There are three key voices within a club that we’re going to talk about today. And with us, a brand conversation will start with any one of these three, depending on who at that club is leading this initiative, or is most interested, or may benefit the most from it. Sometimes it’s the director of marketing/director of membership, depending on how big your club is. It’s the general manager or it’s a member, often a board member, but a member of the club. And figuring out how to help each of those individual people help the other parties at their club understand why this is important is one of the, like you said, probably the most common challenge that we run into, which is why a lot of clubs ultimately choose to just not do anything. They just choose to stay the same because they’re not able to have the right conversation with these other parties and educate them as to what this all is.

Tucker We’ll get into what this is, but too often, branding is dismissed as just logos and colors. We hear that all the time, as though they go and talk to their fellow board members, and they say this just has no traction. They don’t feel like it’s worth the money to spend on logos and colors. And it needs to now be understood as more of a framework that can guide decisions and unify culture, and really shape member experiences moving forward. I had a conversation with a board member a week ago, and we’re finishing up their project, but they said that we don’t think of this project as rebranding. We think of this as branding ourselves. Our club has never taken the time to sit back and really define itself in a compelling way. This club is 75 years old, but they’ve never sat down and said who are we, and where are we going in a way that feels unique and compelling and justified to the new membership. And that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about today.

Derek The conversation goes beyond, and this is where it gets stuck. One of the parties says we need a new logo or we need to revise our logo, and the club that you’re talking about over that 75 years modified its logo 20 times. But the logo is not the brand. We talk about this all the time on this show. The logo is not the brand. It’s just one visual component of a very comprehensive, larger thing that we’ll define and we’ll talk about. So what branding really means is to have a strategic mindset. It means pausing on the logo or the symbols, or the colors, and instead use your brand to help you focus on the vision of the club. How you tell the story of the club of who you are, where you’re going, what’s unique about you, how you convey the specialness of your member experiences, and the culture and the values and what’s valued at your club, that’s a lot more comprehensive than just that one visual symbol.

Tucker When we talk about brand, thinking back to that strategic mindset, it means that the brand is a lens for solving problems and making decisions across the club. When I explain what the value of really considering your brand and building a strategy for the next generation of your club is, it’s focused on the foundation of every decision we make. When it comes to food and beverage, instead of asking what other clubs have done for food and beverage, we should ask what brand do we want to build and what food and beverage helps us go there? What kind of perception do we want our members to have of us? That really helps ease the mind of general managers because general managers and boards are trying to keep up. Everything changes all the time, and they need some kind of guiding tool that helps them move forward in a way that is consistent but also compelling. That makes us feel strong about where we’re going rather than just something everyone else does.

Derek Every club that we’ve worked with at the end of the initiative or at least by the time we got to the end the development and delivered the brand book and the brand style guide and all of the assets in one real cohesive package, every single club we’ve worked with has at that point said, I wish we would have done this before we did our clubhouse remodel or before we renovated our golf course or before we made the decision to do X because having had completed this and had this clarity of our foundation would have made all of those decisions easier, more strategic, and much more thoughtful in why we chose to do what we did. We would have had that North Star.

Tucker When we work with brain strategy, the four components that we lean into are vision, storytelling, member experience, and culture. If we can really hone in on those four pieces, then we would say we’ve developed a brand. Most of the time when we finish our strategy process, someone goes, We’ve been working for two months. We haven’t even talked about a logo yet. We haven’t even looked at visual designs yet. Yeah, that’s not the practice. That’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to build a new mindset for the club. We are trying to guide decision-making and move forward. Let’s get into what clubs struggle with without brand thinking. When they don’t have this brand-centered thinking, what could they really struggle with as they move forward within the organization?

Derek The first one, I jumped ahead, the first one is that lack of clarity. Without thinking about your brand as a strategy, leadership, staff, and the board are running without a shared purpose, an agreed lens or filter to run those decisions through. We’re working with a club, for example, that was considering renovating its fitness center. They stepped back and said, Would this renovation that we’re talking about align with our vision, which specifically says to create world-class amenities for our members? They stepped back, and that filter, that lens, helped them answer that in an authentic way for their club. Thinking again about these groups, members, leadership, marketing, and staff, one group might emphasize tradition at the club, another might push for how to execute it, what that visual looks like. Somebody else might be thinking about culture and say, No, we’re casual and fun. We’re not traditional. It’s just causing a ton of confusion. How do you get past that and actually make a decision about what’s right for us? We’re throwing darts now.

Tucker Imagine the board making facility decisions on a traditional country club aesthetic and direction and facilities, but then the programming directors, whoever’s in charge of programming, are focused on something that’s casual, fun, and very modern. Those are aligned. And so I would say you can’t program well in a facility that doesn’t facilitate those programs. When we get into inconsistencies, that’s where you see a ton of this happen is when we audit a club’s brand, we see inconsistencies all over the place. And I think a lot of people lean into, oh, the visual inconsistency is like our newsletter might look different, or our website might look different, or our materials, our physical materials, might look different. That’s one thing. But really, it comes into communication inconsistencies where we might communicate one thing, we might promise one thing, we might say we’re all about X at our club. But when you get down into what I would call boots on the ground experience, what happens in real life at the club, those are different. And that gap really erodes trust between what members hear boards and general managers talk about versus what they actually experience. If those are so different for so long, it becomes really difficult to even shape a culture. It becomes difficult to mold the future of the club because no one really believes what you’re saying. And that can be a really big challenge.

Derek When you’re communicating one thing, and actually delivering something else, or not communicating what’s happening, over-promising, or just consistency, again, comes up as one of the most common objectives that comes up up front from all these different roles within a club, of how we show up. Think about your favorite restaurant, your favorite meal, and the consistency. The reason you go back and order the same thing every time, and I’m talking to myself, is because I know when I go to that restaurant, that specific meal is going to be exactly the way that it was last time. And therefore, I trust them and I choose them and I continue to want to enjoy that experience.

Tucker If I’m sitting in a group of leadership for a club, and I’m listening for red flags, one of the big non-brand thinking red flags, if I know someone’s not thinking from a brand standpoint, but they’re just thinking super operationally, I think short-term focus is a big thing. I hear decisions getting made tactically around what we should be doing next month. What should the newsletter say this next week? Some of those things are bigger concerns and bigger challenges for them, rather than thinking strategically around what experience are we trying to create over this year’s set of newsletters? Or what are we trying to communicate across the whole set of programs that we’re creating for this season? And you can see almost the tension build around people who make decisions so tactically that they’re jumping. They’re making decisions reactively rather than proactively. And those reactive decisions become stressful because then one member who’s not happy about that reactive decision gets really frustrated. And then the people who made that decision are now flustered because they’re saying, well, you know, we’re trying to make everyone happy. I don’t get why this doesn’t make them happy. And my answer to them is because we’re not thinking strategically. We’re not thinking long-term about not one member, but all of the members. We’re trying to build a community of people who appreciate one thing rather than trying to appease one person who gets really upset about everything.

Derek Another issue in this lack of strategic thinking is, frankly, you end up with a generic brand. You have a brand, whether you’re doing something with it intentionally or not. And by brand, we refer to your brand as your reputation. It’s how people think of you. Think of the best brands that create an emotional connection. I was at a hotel recently. The facilities were fine. It had a treadmill, and it had a hotel bar. It had a gym, it had a pool. It had all of the same facilities as any other hotel. But what this specific experience missed was the opportunity to make me feel like a member of this organization, like I actually mattered there to where I would feel proud and loyal and bonded with this specific hotel or chain. And that is an opportunity to do that with your club. Not grasping that emotional connection is a big miss, especially when you’re doing what you just said, which is focusing on tactics instead of on strategy.

Tucker A lot of people get tied up with, do people like the facilities we have? I think that’s fantastic. But if you just offer facilities, there’s nothing different between you and Lifetime Fitness. There’s nothing different between you in a hotel, like you’re saying. The reason why people join, I think, is that a lot want to bank on we have great facilities and we give them access to those facilities. And I think that that is the functional benefit of joining a club. But if we’re going to be honest with each other, joining a club is a rational, emotional decision. You can’t sit there and rationalize joining a club. There are just too many other financial ways to get what you’re looking for. Club brands need to lean into pride and loyalty and building a deep bond. They have to have an emotional connection. And the ones that don’t have that, they really start sinking to the bottom of the value club tier because they don’t have that deep loyalty and deep sense of who we are, which really makes it hard. It also creates a competitive disadvantage for them. So in markets that are popular, or maybe you have six clubs, but maybe you have 16 clubs in the one market, the ones that really feel interchangeable, the ones that miss on that emotional connection, they do become just another club. They become the, I’m paying for facilities here. It doesn’t matter if your name is X, Y, or Z, because all that I care about is that I have access to a fitness center. That works for some clubs, but the most successful clubs don’t stop at having good facilities. They build an emotional connection that creates a competitive advantage for them.

Derek I’m thinking of the clubs in our market. There are something like 30, 35 private clubs here in the Twin Cities. If you think of the tier one clubs, for people who are aware of these clubs, it evokes something in you. A feeling, an emotion, because they have a reputation. Whether that feeling is true or not, as a non-member, doesn’t matter. It invokes something. But there are a couple of clubs that I would make the case that are on that bottom tier of these 30 that evoke nothing. When you say the name of that club to me, if I don’t know a member there and I haven’t had the opportunity to experience that club because that club has not created a brand, like you said, it’s interchangeable. It’s just, okay, it must be something that people who live nearby enjoy and is convenient for them. But does it stand apart in any other way?

Tucker Overall, if you’re not thinking brand forward, brand-centered, or what I would call brand thinking, if you’re not doing that, your organization, your club, is working extremely hard operationally. That is absolutely justified, and you need to work hard operationally, and that’s great. But you’re leaving an immense amount of opportunity on the table when you talk about pairing the operational standards with an emotional driver of value, in which you’re leaving so much untapped. That’s why things like you could have the same facility as someone down the street, but they have an initiation fee that’s three times the price of yours, that has nothing to do with the facilities. And I think that there are general managers and boards out there that say, you know, if we just build better facilities, we’ll be able to charge more. And yes, that is theoretically true. But you could also do nothing to your facilities and build more emotional value with your brand, and you could still charge more. And so that’s where you get into this idea of what we are trying to do and how we are trying to build this forward. And now I want to shift to how we educate your club on brand thinking. If you’re sitting here and you’re thinking, yes, I agree. I agree this is important. I agree we should do this, but I still can’t have that conversation internally. What should you do? And Derek and I, let’s talk through the five steps that we think you could at least start the conversation with at your club to move this forward.

Derek I had a conversation the other day with a marketing director in a club that said, How do I help my GM understand why this is so important? So this was inspired in part by that conversation. So step one, simplify the concept. Define what brand is in clear language. For example, our brand is how our members and prospects think about us. It’s not our logo. Explain brand as a tool, as an asset, one that drives alignment, drives the consistency that we talked about. It’s not marketing, it’s not advertising, it’s not about some of those jargon words that we might use in the industry. Get to the point of defining first what a brand actually is.

Tucker We need to be better at how our members think about us. It’s an easier conversation than we need to work on our brand. Think about having a conversation with someone in which they can clearly understand this, move it forward, and keep it going. Step two would be to share real-life examples. It’s very helpful to show where the brand is already in play. Say you have pulled good examples and bad examples. If you say our brand is the way that members think about us, and you say this is what we would consider a good way to think about us, and this is not the good way to think about us, show the two examples. Maybe the way the staff answers the phone when a member calls the front desk, or someone’s greeted at the front door, is that good or bad? Are they doing the right thing there? Is it conveying the right things? You might not know at this point to say what is right and what’s wrong for us, but you can start finding those types of examples to say the way that someone answers the phone, the way our tournaments are held and celebrated, and the way that our menus are designed in the main grill, those are ways our brand is conveyed that helps shape the perception of a member or the way a prospect might think about the club.

Derek My club just had, for Labor Day, the season closing, pool party, where everybody’s dogs were invited to join in, jump in the pool. That one moment, that one day of the year, is an example of what that brand means for that specific club.

Tucker If you point out inconsistencies that help shape the narrative around, we’re not considering these things. We’re not solving these challenges. If we really knew who we were and we had a clear definition of that, we’d be able to solve these challenges easier, as in back to the way that people are greeted at the front door example. The way that you, Derek, might greet someone at a front door is probably different than the way that I would naturally. What is right and what is wrong is subjective. But what a brand and a brand direction and thinking about a brand does for you is it creates objective parameters around, oh, well, our club is more traditional. It’s rooted in history, and it does these things. Therefore, the front desk should greet people like this. Rather than our club is modern and casual, and really young and energetic. And therefore, our front desk should answer the phones or greet people like this. That starts solving the problem in which it gets your personal bias out of it. I can’t tell you how many times someone says, Well, I don’t like the way that they do that. And I have to go, it’s not about what you necessarily like. It’s about what’s right for shaping what we want to be seen as. So that really starts changing the narrative around what’s important.

Derek Step three, connect the brand to outcomes, results, and key performance indicators. Most general managers are COOs. They’re all about excellence and operations. So if you can link the brand to what they are already working towards, what they value in some of those measurables, it can help them understand the actual tangible impact that a brand can help them with in achieving those. You can use things like member satisfaction scores from your annual member survey or recruiting and retention. How many members are leaving each year, and why, and how many are staying? And how many are joining you or event participation. Some events are super well attended, some better than others, and why is that? So when you start to understand things like net promoter scores that are going up that want to be higher, but aren’t today, you can now see some benchmarks that help take, again, brand and even reputation is relatively emotional and intangible, but setting and connecting it with some of these tangible aspects will help an operations person better understand why this is important.

Tucker You’re not doing this initiative to get a new logo. I try to tell that to every person we talk to about that. That’s not what we’re doing. We might use a new logo to change the way that people think about things. But our end deliverables for this are business drivers. And if someone inside of a club is not using business or operational-based outcomes as the driver for this project, they’re doing it for the wrong reasons. If you are just saying we need a new logo, then you’re not really looking at the full picture of saying, what are we trying to solve here? What is not going well? Is our member satisfaction not working? Are we not recruiting the right people? Or are we not retaining the right people, or are we not having the participation we want across the club? And then you can say, What tools can we use to change those things? Like logos and colors and storytelling and visual tools, also verbal tools, come into play here. But what we’re not doing is saying we need a new logo because I’m sick of our current logo. That is not going to solve any problems for us and doesn’t help the club move forward, frankly.

Derek Step four is the one that I’m going to call the most important one, or maybe the most actionable one, in thinking about what a general manager might say to a board with respect to the brand. I think one of the most important ways that the GM can present that to this group of leaders is to help them understand how the branding is going to help us as the leadership of this organization who’s role it is, is to execute on the vision and the mission of our organization to help them understand how the brand is the foundation that will help us as a group guide our decision making.

Tucker This gets into such a functional conversation. If your general manager listening to this is going to the board and you say, Here’s how branding can help guide our decision making, a board’s going to go, All right, what do you mean by that? Versus, we need a new logo, and I believe that will help us move forward. And if you were a board member listening to this and you’re saying I can’t get my other board members on the same page as me, the question I’d ask is, are we aligned on what we want members to feel? Are we aligned on how we want the club to move forward, or how we want new members to think about our club as they come into it? And we can’t use words like good. That word isn’t going to help shape experience. It needs to be compelling. It has to be different. It has to be unique to who we are

Derek That alignment often shows up in misunderstanding or not being able to answer who we are as a club and who we are for. What kind of members are right-fit members here, and what does the next 10 years look like that’s going to help us attract more of those kinds of people who see themselves in that vision? That’s an easy one. And then when you think of staff, like the marketing director, whose task, I was going to say unenviable, but they’re great at their job, so it is enviable, their task is to execute an incredible quantity of communications every day to members, sometimes to the public, from a marketing standpoint. One thing that that staff member could say to the GM, rather than saying we need a new logo because that would make my job easier, rather than to position it in terms of your role, what it is that you are trying to do. Whether it’s to communicate more effectively or market more meaningfully, but to explain to them here’s what I see in my role in this case, in this example, as the marketing director or the membership director, that will affect the brand and how I will use the brand to do my job better to make the club better.

Tucker Imagine going to the general manager, if you’re the communications director, and saying I need a new logo and flyer template system because I think ours looks bad versus going to them and saying I think we could increase event participation across the club if we have a new way of looking at how we communicate. Those are just very different conversations, even though it’s the same thing.

Derek That’s an example of tactics versus strategy. If you say we need a new logo so that I can make my website look better, that’s tactical. I don’t feel an incredible desire to help you and to fund that for you. But if you come to them and you lead with that little vision of success that says I think we have an incredible opportunity to double participation in a couple of these events and to do that, here are some things that I would help us with. And you pivot to go strategy first and tactics in their appropriate place.

Tucker Most people assign a gut feeling about something being poor to esthetics, which are absolutely natural, and an easy way to say this looks worse than it should or this should be better than it is. Versus saying I think we can squeeze this orange just a little bit more. There’s an opportunity here in this area that we can get more out of this. And that’s really impactful for someone to take to the table.

Derek Step five of five is reinforce, repeat, reassure. This whole conversation today about educating our various counterparts within our club about brand thinking, parentheses, thinking strategically, not tactically, isn’t a one-time discussion. Somebody in a business, I think it might have been Jim Collins, said it takes seven times for somebody to hear something the first time. So it needs to be baked into many of the different ways that your groups communicate with each other and interact with each on a day-to-day basis and on an ongoing basis.

Tucker When we work with clubs, if it was as simple as hand us your challenge, we’ll solve it and give it back to you, it would be easy. These projects would be super simple, but that’s not the project. The project is educating and change management and moving people forward, and we always stress to whether you’re having our team do it or your team do it to put the brand thinking in leadership retreats every season, to put it into staff training and onboarding, to be able to bring someone onto the team and say, here’s our brand. Here’s how it affects your role specifically. Here’s how you’re going to operate better because you know what’s expected of you. You put it in your board orientation. When new boards come on board, what are you doing? What are you saying to them? Are you giving them materials to do their job well? I hear a lot from general managers and ex-board members that they complain that the new board doesn’t understand where they should be going and what they should be doing. And my question to them is, have you given them the tools to make those decisions, or are they just going based on their gut reaction to what they see? And that answer, which is always a gut reaction, is a real clear indicator of the challenges that clubs see around not making investments in things consistently and not having cohesiveness around initiatives and where they’re going. And baking this all into the foundation and the fabric of the club’s operational background, whether it’s GMs or boards or staff members, it makes your job so much easier. No matter what your job is, it makes it easier and it keeps the conversation alive so that brand and who we are becomes second nature to the club. It becomes an easier conversation rather than, you know, I went to this hotel last week and they did stuff like this. I think we should change the way that we serve people here, just because I like that versus this, and that then throws a wrench in everyone’s perception around, okay, so what are we doing here then? And makes everyone’s life a little bit more stressful.

Derek So, for club leaders, a great next step is to start the conversation internally by asking, Do we truly have a brand here, or do we just have a logo? Maybe the logo is outdated, but do we have a wonderful brand with a logo that’s cosmetically not helping us tell our story? Or do we have a killer logo? One that doesn’t represent anything that’s truly behind us because we haven’t taken the time to build that brand and to do this strategic brand thinking that sets the foundation. Just imagine having the clarity of a member coming up and saying, I heard the board was considering putting in a cold plunge in the ladies’ locker room, renovating the traditional bar into a sports bar, putting in a Himalayan putting green outside, or adding a specific playground for the children of our board members. Which one are we going to do if we can only afford one? And you, as the board member or the GM, having the clarity of saying, well, based on the vision that we’ve decided on who we are, who we’re for, and where we’re going, this is the one that by far and away makes the most sense and would be most impactful to our club.

Tucker The first thing that you could do today is start noticing those inconsistencies. Start looking across the club, across experiences, not just the visual stuff, but the way that people are greeted, the way that people are served, the way that someone might use a website or look at an event material, and bring that up in casual conversation. My favorite thing is when I tell people to start this conversation, it has to be casual. It can’t be formal. It has to be over a beer or just over coffee or something, and say, Do you ever notice how the way that people are greeted at the front door doesn’t really align with the way that we want people to experience the bar right inside that door and someone going, Yeah, I guess. And you would say, Wouldn’t it be easier if we just did X, or we just had a clear understanding of what that expectation was to do that? If you start those conversations casually, they snowball into something bigger around, Yeah, that is a challenge. We could solve that, and we could be a little bit better than we are today.

Derek And when you do that, I highly advocate for the way that you pose that is by not only posing the question but by offering the solution. Not just by making something sound like you want to change it just for the sake of change, that just causes challenges. But when you pose it, like you just said, have you noticed how much Alyssa struggles to keep the website fresh and up to date? Like, would it be so much more helpful if she had a brand style guide that would give her the guidance to make sure she’s communicating in our language and saying what we want to say and not have to think about it and make it up and start from scratch every day? Offering the solution helps the conversation be two-way and not just saying that’s a problem, period. What are we going to do?

Tucker Right. We just had a conversation yesterday with a client who said, You know what’s really frustrating to me is that every time I get in front of the membership, our presentations look different. And I wish that I knew that our presentations were going to be different, or why they were different, or why they’re changing altogether. And then to say that is the challenge. The solution is, wouldn’t it be great if we had a templated way to present our communications so that it felt like it was us and it was consistent and it the same every time? And that goes farther than just saying, we need a new visual template for the way that we present materials, because I think ours is outdated. It’s not about harping on the challenge, but asking, how could we be thinking about this to create more alignment and more loyalty and more pride? There’s always opportunity in the club world to create more pride. That is what you are doing. You are creating pride. And if you think about your brand in a more strategic way, you’ll find that pride, you’ll build that pride.

Derek Clubs that thrive, that are truly successful, don’t just manage operations on a short-term term day-to-day basis. They define their brand first and then actively live that brand every day. So, educating your team about brand thinking is the first step towards making this possible. So if you are ready to take that step, if you’re looking for help in that, we would love to help guide that process. I think we still have our free workbook up on our website, if you are interested, at sussner.com, that you can download and at least start putting some of these questions into context for you.

Tucker And when we go through that process, that workbook has the first questions that we would ask. If you’re saying, Hey, come on site and start asking us questions, those are the first ones. We put them in that document. I remember why. For the CMAA World Conference, they said, Hey, do you have anything that I can give to my team members to start this conversation? That is on our website. It’s under our resources tab. It’s free to download. We don’t even ask for an email. It’s yours, just take it. It helps that conversation. But thanks for listening to this conversation. And we’ll see you next time on Brands Made Meaningful.

Derek Thanks for listening. Sussner is a branding firm dedicated to helping make a meaningful mark, guiding member organizations into the next chapter of their story. Learn more at sussner.com.