No Amount of Marketing Can Tell a Story You Haven’t Uncovered
Your website could use a refresh. Your social presence feels flat. The video you invested in last year hasn’t moved the waitlist. The instinct is to look for a better channel: a sharper campaign, a new platform, something to fix what feels broken.
The channel is rarely the problem. What’s usually missing is upstream of all of it: a story clear enough to tell.
Every Club Sounds the Same
Most private clubs describe themselves the same way: championship golf course, award-winning dining, resort-style amenities. It’s an accurate list, and it’s also the exact list every club down the road is using to describe itself.
That sameness isn’t a messaging problem. It’s an identity problem. When a club hasn’t done the work of defining what it stands for, every piece of marketing defaults to describing what’s physically there instead of what a prospective member would feel by belonging to it.
The gap becomes obvious the moment you compare two clubs’ websites side by side. Swap the logo and the address, and most of the copy could belong to either one. That’s not a failure of the person writing it. It’s evidence that nobody has yet done the harder work of deciding what makes this particular club different from the one ten miles away.
Ed Heil, owner of StoryTeller Club Marketing and host of the industry podcast Crushing Club Marketing, sees this constantly. Clubs come to him wanting help with video, with email, with a website that converts. What he often finds underneath the request is a club that hasn’t defined itself clearly enough for any content to have something to build from.
“If they don’t have a soul, it’s really hard to connect to,” Heil says.
Permission to Play Isn’t a Story
Part of the sameness problem traces back to how clubs define their own values. Ask most clubs what they stand for, and the answers tend to cluster around integrity, excellence, quality, community. These aren’t wrong. They’re also not distinctive, because they’re true of nearly every club that would ever describe itself that way.
This is the baseline someone expects before they’ll even consider the club, not the thing that sets it apart. A club can meet every one of them and still have nothing memorable to say about itself, because none of those words carry any specific feeling. They describe a standard, not an identity.
The clubs with stories that land have gone one level deeper. They’ve found the specific thing that’s true of their culture and nobody else’s, and they’ve built the courage to lead with that instead of the safer, more generic language every competitor is also using.
When the Story Is Already There
Sometimes the hardest part isn’t finding a new story. It’s uncovering the one a club already lives.
Heil describes working with the owner of a well-known, highly respected privately held club who struggled to explain what the place should feel like. Pressed for a description, he couldn’t produce one. So Heil tried a different approach and asked him to describe a club he personally admired instead. The owner named a well-regarded private club he belonged to elsewhere and described it in vivid, specific detail: the feeling of the place, what it meant to be there, why it mattered to him. Then came one more question. If your club felt like that, would that be what you want people to feel? The answer was immediate. Yes.
The story wasn’t missing. It had been there the entire time, buried under the assumption that describing amenities was the same thing as describing identity. Once the owner had language for the feeling, everything downstream, the content, the messaging, the tone of every touchpoint, had something real to build from.
That pattern isn’t rare. Most club leaders know what their club is at some level. They simply haven’t been asked the right question to help them put it into words.
Marketing Can Carry a Story. It Can’t Build One.
This is the distinction that matters most for any club troubleshooting a quiet waitlist or a marketing plan that isn’t converting. Video, email, social content, and a strong website are all real, valuable tools. None of them can manufacture an identity that doesn’t exist yet.
When a club skips the identity work and moves straight to content, the results tend to feel exactly like what they are: technically well produced, emotionally empty, and undifferentiated. Prospective members can sense the difference even when they can’t articulate why. A video with beautiful footage of a golf course doesn’t answer the question a prospect is asking, which is some version of do I see myself here.
Once identity is genuinely defined, the opposite happens. Content stops feeling like a separate project and starts feeling obvious. Every touchpoint, from a member spotlight video to a new member welcome email, has something specific to reinforce instead of a blank page to fill.
The Work Compounds Past the Prospect
Identity clarity doesn’t stop mattering once someone joins. The first six to twelve months after a new member signs on are a critical window, one where clubs either deepen the connection they promised or let it fade into administrative silence.
The staff who greet a new member by name in their first weeks are doing identity work as much as any campaign. They’re proving the story that got someone to join is true once they’re inside it. A club that tells a compelling story to attract a member and then goes quiet once the initiation fee is paid is teaching that member the story wasn’t entirely honest. Members who feel connected in that early window become the ones referring others, and referrals remain one of the most reliable sources of new membership any club has. The story that attracted them and the experience that followed either reinforce each other or quietly contradict each other, and members notice which one it is.
The Stakes Are Rising
For years, clubs could rely on search engines to surface whatever content existed, generic or not. That’s changing. Heil points out that a growing share of people researching a club today are asking an AI tool directly and getting a synthesized answer, rather than a list of links to sort through themselves. That shift raises the cost of vague identity.
Undifferentiated language is easy for an algorithm to compress into forgettable sameness, or skip in favor of a competitor whose identity is distinct enough to describe clearly. Clarity was always an advantage. It’s becoming a requirement.
Where to Start
For a leader wondering whether their club’s story is doing its job, the instinct is often to reach for a new tool: a better website, more video, a smarter email platform, a new CRM. The real starting point is earlier than any of that.
Start by trying to say, in plain, specific language, what it feels like to belong to your club. Not the amenities. Not the history, unless the history is doing real emotional work. The feeling itself. If that’s hard to produce, that difficulty is the finding. It means the identity work hasn’t been done yet, and no channel strategy will substitute for it.
Once that story exists in language you can say out loud, the rest of the work gets easier, not harder. The channels stop being the challenge. They become the delivery system for something that was worth saying all along. And the language doesn’t need to be polished at first. Getting the sentiment right, plain-spoken and unrefined, matters more than getting the words perfect. Progress over perfection.
This article draws from Episode 116 of Clubs Made Meaningful: Putting Your Story Together, a conversation with Ed Heil, owner of StoryTeller Club Marketing and host of Crushing Club Marketing. His perspective on the gap between a club’s story and its marketing informs how we think about what has to be true before any content strategy can work. Listen here, watch here.
Schedule a 30-minute discovery call. We’ll show you how to find the story your club already has, before you invest in another channel to tell it. Want more content like this? Sign up for Clubs Made Meaningful Insights: original frameworks and ideas on identity, belonging, and club culture, delivered weekly to your inbox.
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Clubs Made Meaningful
A Podcast by Sussner
