EPISODE 73

Derek Welcome to Brands Made Meaningful conversations with the team at Sussner about how purposeful branding inspires unity, identity, and powerful change for growth-minded organizations.

Tucker In this episode of Brands Made Meaningful, we’re going to talk about something we don’t normally talk about, and that’s ourselves. We had a request from a couple of people to talk more about us, talk more about Sussner, what we do, who we are, and what we’re all about. And so we thought instead of talking about that in a bunch of different ways, let’s just do one neat episode that allows people to understand who we are, where we come from, and what is our perspective. Why do we have a podcast? Why should I be listening to your podcast? How does that all work?

Derek Like you said, maybe it’s because we’re from the Midwest that we’re so focused on our clients and our customers that it’s not very often that we step back and talk about ourselves. So I thought it was a great opportunity to just give people a little bit more information about who we are, what we do, and why we’re so excited about these conversations and having this podcast and sharing the type of content that we talk about.

Tucker And it’s bigger than just you and I and we’ll get into that – who the people are behind us on our team and how we work and all those things. But I wanted to start with what we do from the highest level to give someone a snapshot of I’m hearing you talk, why should I care?

Derek Our agency, which is called Sussner, specializes in branding. Sussner is a brand firm that focuses on brand strategy and brand design or brand development, primarily for the private club industry. So we’re a team of strategists, designers, and writers that are working to help clubs communicate, differentiate and ideally do a better job engaging with their members.

Tucker This looks like evolving a club’s image, or maybe the way that they speak like their language, helping them stay relevant for the next generation of members. So what we focus on is understanding the club, what they’re all about, how they should be seen in that marketplace, whether it’s local or national, understanding the challenges, where they want to go, what kind of club they want to be, and helping them communicate that through visuals. This includes things like logo design, copywriting, and a lot of different things. Sometimes it’s just strategic like consultative work that allows them to understand the way they should be thinking about themselves. But talk about the clubs that we help and what stage of their transformation they are in and when they’re a good fit for our type of work.

Derek Most of the clubs that we work with are going through some sort of transition or transformation. We’ve seen a variety of different evolutions or changes that clubs are going through. Some of those are reactive. Sometimes clubs are reacting to a changing market or a turnover in the age demographic or the type of membership they have. Other clubs are very visionary and very focused on the direction in which they’re going. It could be as tactical as building a new clubhouse or renovating the clubhouse or renovating the golf course. Other clubs are even thinking much more visionary around their uniqueness and how to separate themselves. We call this positioning in branding speak, but how do they separate themselves from other clubs who are similar to them, and who have similar amenities? But the throughline with all of these clubs is change and change for good, change for positive. It’s a very future aspirational endeavor.

Tucker When a client or a prospective client asks me why I work with someone or why would someone even talk to me other than the situation in which they’re in, I either say, the brand that a club has doesn’t always align with who they are, whether it’s their culture, their traditions, their offering, or their value that they create. Maybe it’s their initiation fee. We work with a lot of clubs that go, Hey, if I’m going to charge $80,000 for an initiation fee, I have to look that part or I have to elevate my game a little bit to attract the right people. Or a club’s brand doesn’t align with who they aspire to be. That goes into that visionary conversation to say the type of member we want is this person. We don’t align today with attracting that type of person. Or we envision a club where maybe right now we’re a golf club and we want to be more of a country club or maybe like a residential-focused club. We don’t look that and we don’t communicate that through a lot of things. So how do we do that? So it’s really about understanding who you are today and where you want to go and then communicating that and making sure your brand, which is a fuzzy, squishy topic in itself, aligns with that aspiration or current state.

Derek Now think of your brand as your reputation. When we look at brand, that word, what that means to us is being very intentional and proactive in creating how people in the industry think of you so that they think of you in a way that is helpful to your organization and whatever your organization aspires to be, whether it’s growth or status quo. We work with clubs that are looking to fill out membership. We’re working with clubs that have a super healthy waiting list and attracting members is not part of what’s on their radar. Oftentimes they’re more focused on attracting staff – staff that also aligns with the culture and the environment in which they work every day as the face of that brand. So that reputation is a really big component and communicating that is what everybody is challenged with. It’s easy to default to the amenities that you have to how long your club’s been around history, great golf course, name, brand, architect, etc. But those are just pieces of the story. They’re not the whole story. And what we try to get to is that true uniqueness that’s authentic to that club that really differentiates it from everybody else to then help show the clubs how they can tell that story as they look forward.

Tucker If I tie a bow on what someone gets out of our work, it’s for club leadership, boards, general managers, and all the people that we work with hand in hand. They get to elevate the club in a different way. And to your point, it depends on the challenge that the club is up against. Whether it’s to say we have a five-year waitlist, we’re closing our waitlist because we just can’t take more people on that. That’s a different challenge than what should we do with our brand versus we need people in the door, we need members. And that’s different too. So it focuses on how do we build member satisfaction or attractiveness and what is our challenge and how do we build that to just build something that is elevated, that’s different, that’s fresh, that really stands out?

Derek And that’s what you get. The tactics of what we do, like you said before, might be brand assets, visuals, taglines, headlines, and marketing materials. It could be a new logo, could be tournament branding for all the tournaments. Those are the tactical deliverables. But what you get, what you receive, the things that are leveraged from all of those tactic components are those much more aspirational emotional components. The successes are truly what you said. The success is this member satisfaction and attracting future members and I would say, future employees and staff. I would add that to that mix.

Tucker For anyone listening who’s interested in saying, Whoa, whoa, you just talked about tournament branding. Like, what is that? That’s what all of our conversations are about. So if you go, why do you guys have a podcast? What do you guys even talk about? That’s what this is. So what we do per episode is to dive into some of those concepts, to dive into what is tournament branding and why would you do it. And what is the difference between redoing a member brand or maybe talking about employee branding like you mentioned earlier? So we’re not going to dive into that today. What I want to go to next is who are we? So if that’s what we do and that’s the output and what we work on and all those great things, who are we, where are we located, what’s our team? How does this all work?

Derek For a team that’s located physically in Minneapolis, Minnesota, we’re a team of seven people, seven full-time employees on staff who are in our office almost every day. I think we’re in four days a week now. We have a couple of optional work-from-home days. It’s interesting now post-COVID, that question comes up all the time and it’s for good reason. Is your team virtual? Does it work from home? And given the nature of the work that we do and how collaborative it is, the way that our process looks, our team thrives on the physical interaction and in the way that we collaborate.

Tucker The location of our Sussner is in Minneapolis in the North Loop if anyone knows anything about Minneapolis. But our clientele is clubs-wide, and we work United States-wide. So I think a lot of people ask, Hey, why’s a company from Minnesota helping me in California? How does that work? And so we do travel, we go to clubs, we do all that stuff. You’ll probably see us around whether it’s the CMAA National Convention or any of those things. But, yeah, nationwide.

Derek Yeah, good point. The nice thing about being in Minnesota too is it’s super central. It’s easy for us to travel to Florida, to Boston, to California, the East Coast, the West Coast, or Texas. We’re super nimble that way. Talk about the roles from your perspective. So we have a team of seven. Just give people a brief overview. To some people that might sound like a large team. To some people that might sound like a small team. But from your perspective, explain how we see that.

Tucker When you think about agencies generally, for general creative agencies, that’s pretty small to say seven people. But for a specialized firm like Sussner, that might seem, like you’re saying, kind of large. The difference is when you would look at copywriters, designers, strategists, that really is the makeup of our team. We have two on-site. You are trained in graphic design, but you’re the creative director. I’m the strategist on our team. We have communications and accounts people who work with us hand in hand. There is a level of nimbleness, as you would say, with working in a small team. Generally, our clients get to meet and see and interact with all of the people on our team. That’s a benefit in our mind to working on a small, limited number of projects with a good team of people who understand it. Our goal isn’t to work on as many clubs as possible. Our goal is to really understand and help the clubs that share their passion with us on how we can get their members more excited about things and do all that. It’s our job to understand who you are, and what you’re all about, and we do that best when we’re on a small team. So I think that’s important for someone to see. And when they work through a process with us, you’ll see that process move through. So maybe on the front end, you’ll work with me, Derek will be involved, but you’ll work with our accounts teams, understand the problem, understand the challenge, build our strategy, and figure out what we’re trying to talk about and how we’re going to do this. Then it shifts to more of our creative team. So you work with our copywriters and you work with our designers figuring out what works with them. And you’ll actually get to talk to them, which I think is a huge value to say, Hey, I know Blake is one of our designers. Hey, Blake, here’s what I was thinking. What do you think about this and how can we do that? And so that level of collaboration, I think, is different than what some people will experience working with maybe a large advertising agency or maybe a large generalist firm.

Derek We really come in alongside our clients. We like to say we’re all in. When we’re working with you, we’re all in. We are part of your team. It’s almost the equivalent of us having a desk on-site with you during the process. Not only while any sort of development or strategy is happening, but even to continue to be a resource and a guide as any sort of brand rolls out just to make sure that you’ve got somebody to reach out to, to make sure things are working, things are going right and things are engaging and communicating as successfully as they should be.

Tucker There is another level of personality matching or understanding your work environment. The value of being able to tell your communications director to reach out to Tessa on our team directly with a question and to say, Yep, she’s going to know everything about your club. We know everything about what’s going on, your dates, your calendars, how this is all going to work, what time your members come back if you’re a seasonal club, and what’s going on. That value of looking at us as a part of your team can provide stability when maybe you have new people coming in or that board turns over and you understand that you have a brand partner that allows you to flux and change, but you always have someone that can give you an answer, can give you direction, or can just give you another set of eyes on something is valuable for our clients. I know a lot of people want to know, Give us the history. Give us the high level. It’s 25 years this year. So give us the background on there and a little bit of how we stumbled into the club world and why we only work with clubs and how that works.

Derek Like you said, we were super excited that this year we’re celebrating 25 years in business, and the first I would say 20 years of that brand work was primarily with sports, sporting goods, and sports teams ranging from strategy work for the teams to stadium graphics, implementing of the brand, creating the brands, and then for the sporting goods clients, helping with the retail side of that, how to engage customers and make customers brand advocates. My hobby and passion is golf – playing golf. If you’re watching this, you can maybe see by some of the things that I collect that are behind me. A bunch of the people on our team are also golfers. And so when we had the opportunity back in about 2021 to work with our first club, the opportunity to combine my own personal interest with the professional skills that our team has and provides, and to bring that to a club to take the same process that we work with on a sporting goods brand. But instead of looking at the customers as the consumers, now we’re looking at the members as the customers and the consumers. And the aspect of providing and creating a sense of belonging for those people is similar, but a little bit different than, say, converting purchase on a product in a retail environment. We absolutely fell in love with providing that sense of belonging and helping clubs do that for their members. And so there’s so much opportunity for clubs to be doing just a little bit of a better job than what they’re doing. I think especially since Covid with some of the landscapes that have shifted, the demographics have shifted, and what members want now is evolving compared to what members wanted 20 or even 10 years ago. And that’s something we are really excited to be helping clubs with.

 Tucker I was a part of this shift in 2021 when we looked at how this all happened and the opportunity to bring this industry a more elevated version of brand development was so exciting for us because the clients that we’ve worked with say it all the time – there’s no one that does that level of research, that does that level of strategy, that does that level of design at that point. And there’s nothing wrong with this, but there’s a lot of artists, there’s a lot of one-off designers and they work through things. And that’s really what the industry has been provided to this point. Our goal is to provide that high level, world-class level of moving through a full-on brand development process, like we’ve worked with big international sporting goods clients, but doing that for these clubs that need the resources and need the expertise and allow us to really kind of be nimble with them is super exciting. But that has also mirrored the ability to work with professional teams and to work with people in Major League Baseball or the National Football League and to work with them on that sense of belonging, too. So I think we work with clubs and that is our specialty. But whenever you see us or ask us what else is going on, there might be a couple of really cool small projects we’re doing for other people outside the industry every once in a while.

Derek So besides checking into this podcast that we publish every other week, if somebody else would like more information, they want even a deeper dive into who we are and what we do, what are the ways people can find out more about us?

Tucker LinkedIn is going to be the best way if you want something that’s up today. If you’re a more visual person, maybe Instagram would be better. You can look up Sussner on these socials and find us. If you follow us on Instagram, you’ll see certain things like stories. Like I can think of a new golf club that one of our clients just came out with. That is an awesome three-wood, by the way. That was, Hey, look at this new product or Hey, look at this new thing. That’s a good way to stay up. LinkedIn’s great to just see more of what’s one, what work have we been doing, and what’s going on in our neck of the woods. And then if you go to our website, you can subscribe to our email list and we send out thoughts like this. If you’re more of a reading person rather than a listening person, we do blog posts every couple of weeks that talk about some of these specific challenges that we’ve seen clubs go through and how we’ve kind of gotten over those humps.

Derek You can always call us. You can always go old school and pick up the phone and give us a shout.

Tucker Yeah, I love talking to people. If you call our office, Allie will probably answer. You’ll probably hear from her.

Derek So there’s a brief summary that helps give a little bit of clarity on who Sussner is, what we do, why we do it, and what the clubs that we do it for should look for and should be experiencing from a partnership with a branding firm.

Tucker I’m sure we missed something, but you’ll have to just have a conversation with us to find out the stuff that we’re missing.

Derek Perfect. We’ll see you next time on Brands Made Meaningful.

Tucker Thank you.

Derek Sussner is a branding firm specializing in helping companies make a meaningful mark, guiding marketing leaders who are working to make their brand communicate better, stand out, and engage audiences to grow their business. For more on Sussner, visit Sussner.com.

For more information on our team, visit here.

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