EPISODE 74

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, welcome back. We’ve come together for another conversation about the lack of member merchandise on the wall behind you.

Tucker We talk about member merchandise all the time. I, as you can see, hate member merchandise. No, I think there’s this level of what you do with member merchandise. We had a lot of conversations with our clients and a lot of clubs going through work, saying, So what do we do now, and how do we do this? We had a conversation offline about what you do if an identity is already established. What if you’ve launched this and maybe you’ve done a rebrand, maybe you have it. Maybe your brand identity has been intact for 30 years and you just say, I don’t really think we have the appetite for the whole thing, but is there something we can do that gets our membership excited? This came back to a concept that we had with another client of ours – another club – about seasonal merchandise campaigns – member merchandise campaigns. And I know it’s focused on merchandising, but it’s really a bigger understanding of how you get members excited season after season aside from maybe updating your course or completely redoing your clubhouse. What is maybe a low-cost way of getting people energized about the year coming?

Derek There are certainly clubs, at least in the United States, that are open year-round, that are active year-round. But when we think about the clubs in the South where their primary season is from, say, October to April or the clubs of the North and they’re honing in on April to October, the seasonality of that gives you an opportunity when people essentially go away and then come back. That coming back, that re-invitation – I remember going back to school in the fall and it’s a new season. It’s a new time. It’s a new year. And there’s an opportunity to leverage that seasonality to delight members in a brand-related way in the way that we want to talk about it. What we’re looking at is one of the ways to do that – a member merchandising route. So the benefit to the member is a celebration. One of the benefits to the club could be financial. But another benefit is the engagement. We’re excited to talk about this today, plus I’m kind of a merch person. So speaking about how brands come to life in whatever – collectibles, wearables, something that will make me even more deeply part of my club – I’m all for it.

Tucker Most members are. I don’t know if I’ve ever walked into a pro shop with a number and they’re just like, I don’t need to look at the merchandise. I don’t need to look at it. They at least look. Even if it’s not changed, they go, Is anything different? Anything new? Anything I can see? So this all came back with a club we worked with a couple of years ago talking about how we re-energize or how you continuously energize. They had seen a lot of success with launching a refreshed brand identity and they said, Well, how do you keep that energy every season? That’s what we want to do. How do we do that? Our work with a handful of professional sports teams in the NFL and MLB actually gave us a really great idea. Would you look at any of these teams? They’ll always kick off their season with a new theme, a new direction, a new style to say, Hey, this is what’s fresh. Are you ready for the season coming up? And we were thinking, what if you can take that into the club world? What if you gave this small batch of raving fans a chance for them to celebrate your club year after year? And so when we look at that unique theming, when we look at that campaign, that could be around club milestones like we just talked about the club you’re a part of celebrating 110 years this year. You could go around what that looks like. You could do something around member interest. Maybe our culture loves one thing and they always rally around it. Could we lean into something like that? Or maybe there’s something going on culturally or globally that goes, this is a really great time to have some kind of conversation around this more exciting piece. But really, it’s an opportunity for you to celebrate your members in a unique way.

Derek You and I are experiencing this as sports fans. This year Major League Baseball introduced, what I think they call the City Connect uniforms. So they mixed into a rotation. I was at a Minnesota Twins game a week ago, and their pro shop, of course, features all the classic and other logo gear, but also a huge display of merchandise all around this specific year’s jerseys. I think that’s new for MLB and the NFL’s been doing color rush jerseys for those Thursday night games for several years now, and so is the NBA. I have good friends who are NBA fans who actually take that jersey, the city jersey, from year to year to year that gets redesigned and reintroduced every year. And they see that collection as part of their connection to that team and what being a fan of that team means. And that’s what we see. We see that same opportunity now within the club space.

Tucker A generic example might be, let’s say your club is a huge, passionate golf club that is focused a lot on just the excellence of golf. Maybe it’s like championship golf or something like that. You might consider something that’s like Legends of the Links or some kind of campaign that dives into past club champions or other things like that. And you develop a logo for it and you develop a conversation around it and maybe you even develop some events around it and say, Yeah, we’re just trying to build this into something that’s exciting and it’s limited. But that idea of being limited, we’re just doing it this year. We’re just doing this right now. This is not a long-term thing. It can become really interesting because a real example would be a club we worked with in Florida that was super passionate about wildlife. They were an Audubon Reserve. They’re super passionate about birds. They have alligators on their course, they have turtles, and sometimes they get manatees. It’s a really big part of their culture to talk about wildlife, preserving wildlife, those types of conversations. And so when we worked with them, we actually took that idea and said, Well, what if we had a seasonal campaign where each season when members came back, because the Florida season for many who know it really starts in October, they want to celebrate a different animal. So we provide this mark, this changing mark. So I think last year was the year of the Eagles, and this year was the year of the Alligator. And they have the graphics, they have new things in the merchandising shop, they have new stories, new things are on there. And then it actually becomes a place for members to celebrate the new season. I think of my experience of playing high school football was that every year you’d play and you kind of have a different graphic on the front and you had the year that you played on your sleeve. And that kind of gave this sense of timeliness and the sense of you know when you belong to that, and that’s this next level that we’re trying to give members as they think about their club in a deeper setting.

Derek In the past when we worked with sporting goods brands, this is a natural part of retail. It’s a part of any consumer-facing brand of any sort. For product companies like Apple, it’s the new iPhone, and then that becomes a whole brand identity that Apple celebrates with its super loyal brand advocate fans for retail brands, for sporting goods brands. It’s what’s new this year? Every year at retail, they’re introducing the new line, the new product, or the new upgrade. And that often comes with a theme that helps them tell that story in a fresh, thoughtful, and integrated way. But for clubs now, when we roll into the merchandising of it, milestones can be part of this. But you’re not going to celebrate, I guess you could, but this year we’re 31, now we’re 32. So you could do that. But otherwise the key milestones like 25, 50, 75, and 100 come around once in a while and those should absolutely be celebrated too. We’re talking about something that we can get on board with and leverage every year. There doesn’t have to be a substantial part of what you do, but it’s the icing on top. It’s the cherry on top of that icing. It’s something that delights members. And once this momentum starts, they’ll start looking forward to it.

Tucker There’s a level of celebrating. So let’s take the 100-year example, the 110-year example. To say 110 years is awesome, but who cares really? And there’s this level of if you mix that in with something more about us rather than, Hey, we’re old, there’s this level of going, So what? What are we all about? What’s different about us? Maybe we can lean into something that’s really unique about our culture at that point and at that area where we can celebrate ourselves rather than just celebrating longevity. Those 100-year anniversaries are really great. But if you boil it down, all you’re celebrating is survival, which isn’t very exciting, but it’s this level of going, what does that hundred years mean to us and what’s so different about us and how can we move that forward?

Derek So let’s assume that a club, somebody that’s listening, has thought through and brainstormed some things that are super important to them, to their culture, that are unique to who they are as a club. And they’ve come up with some concepts and some themes that they deem worth celebrating. What are a handful of really low-hanging fruit – easy, effective places and ways to integrate it into a club and its activities?

Tucker Well, one would be an event. One would be some kind of launch. One would be whether it’s a welcome back kind of event or some kind of, Hey, we’re starting this and this is what it is. Having some kind of unveiling is a fantastic opportunity to get people gathered, to get people socializing, talking about things, introducing a new concept, and celebrating us. How are we celebrating the membership culture? That’s a really great way. Campaign-specific member merchandise is super easy and we’ve talked about it a lot of times. Do you have different shirts? Do you have different things like MLB teams do jerseys? It’s exactly that to say, Well, we’re always going to sell this in this type of color. This is going to symbolize our new season campaign and this is what we’re all about. Maybe you have interactive elements. Maybe before that unveiling, you ask people to submit ideas. Maybe you get this to be a more collective type of idea generator where people feel like they’ve actually contributed creatively to what they’re going to celebrate, which is a great way to get people involved. You could give better communications thinking about teaser emails, things around, Hey, what is it? Getting people excited about what’s going to come is a great way to think about this. Using social media platforms to celebrate it all campaign long. Let’s say this is something that you run for three months and you work on that. What does that look like? What is the behind the scenes of developing it all look like? What are the testimonials of people talking about it? Maybe there are stories going back to that wildlife thing. Maybe there’s great imagery. Maybe you get a photographer to come shoot a bunch of wildlife photos that then kind of pop up in this type of space. So it’s way more than just the idea of saying, Hey, what can we put on a shirt so we can sell more shirts? The idea is that we can get more people involved and feel excited about what’s coming. It’s just to find new ways to celebrate ourselves and to be really, really purposeful around what that celebration is because we know our club better than anyone else does. Here’s how we’re different because we’re more than just a golf club. We’re more than just a country club. We’re more than just a community where a set of people with similar ideas and values and and something that stands apart from other areas.

Derek I think your point on the investment of it is pretty important because the investment isn’t substantial like renovating a restaurant is. I think the investment is mostly time. It’s branding and it’s marketing and it’s more around hours and an investment of time that I think we’ll all be paid back in multiples just in the amount of additional activity, additional engagement, and additional merchandise that sold at a minimum. Imagine even if the financial investment was a break even with the time that you invested and the amount of merch sold for that seasonality. So that the financial investment was a break even, the member engagement and the deepening of their connection – how do you put a value on that? I saw an Instagram recently a person who’s attended, I don’t know, the last 15 Masters in a row, and they had a hat and all they had was a pin, just a little pin from each year that they went. Think of the value that that hat with 15 pins on it has to that person and their connection with that very specific event, brand annual thing. And every one of those pins was designed a little bit differently to reflect that year. It was awesome.

Tucker And if they tell a little bit different story, for that it’s easy then to go, Whoa, it’s the Masters. It only happens this time. We get to lean into something else and that’s how it works. If you think you can go to the Masters multiple years in a row and they don’t have a different merchandise shop every year, you’re kidding yourself because that’s a ton of how they keep that moving forward. I mean, you’ve been there. You know what it’s like. They deck that place out. And so for us to look at this as an opportunity, like the club that we’ve worked on with this, it wasn’t necessarily to say, Hey, we’re trying to figure out how to get more revenue. And that wasn’t really the conversation. The goal is to figure out how we make members love being here and how we make sure members feel a deep sense of pride, and they have this level of longevity that they could celebrate. To say I was here during the year of the Eagle and that was 2019 and now it’s 2029 and I still wear that shirt every once in a while. People might see it go, Wow, I can’t believe you were here when that happened. That’s really cool. This level of earmarking your experience and giving you a chance to raise your hand and say, Yeah, I’ve been a member this long, and that doesn’t start by giving people membership things 25 years from now back then. You start now and you let that longevity kind of bake into it. And I think that that’s a huge opportunity for a lot of clubs just thinking about how to do things a little differently.

Derek You know, a lot of clubs and organizations have their own traditions that have happened either intentionally or organically over the years. This is another way to add another tradition or another element to something that can happen on a seasonal or annual type of basis that doesn’t need to be incredibly complex. However, it gives you the opportunity to be continually refreshing and leveraging your brand identity in these fun, dynamic ways that will feel new and exciting to members without having to redesign and reinvent. This is all underneath your master bread. We’re not talking about a massive brand refresh or brand overhaul. I’m going to assume that your brand is strong and in a good place. This is within that story. It helps tell the story.

Tucker Yeah. I think that the key here is to be consistent, to be creative, to think outside the box. You don’t need to do something that you’re comfortable with or maybe every club does. The idea is to be yourself, be different, and really kind of push the boundaries. Because it’s so temporary. That’s the beauty of campaigns. It’s so temporary that you can do something and next season you could do something different and you could say, all right, we’ve learned from that. This is maybe something that members want more. Or maybe we did a bunch of hats and our members are more shirt people than hat people. Or maybe they actually want posters instead of that. It gets into the idea of testing and changing and adapting to the members and what they want and how you get better and better and better every year because your membership evolves over time too. So this is a really great way, a low-cost way to just revitalize, reenergize that membership, and get them re-engaged.

Derek Fun conversation. It’s fun to get into. I know a lot of our conversations are very high and very sort of up in that umbrella portion of the brand. And so from time to time for us to get down into the weeds around how to really activate and integrate your brand to your benefit, it was a super fun conversation. It was a good way today.

Tucker This type of work is awesome. hope someone hears this and goes, I need to do this. Give us a call. I love doing this work. This work is so exciting because you get to help someone do something different and change and you kind of do something with this idea of like, how can we really surprise our members this season. This is just super fun stuff and I hope that people take this and run with it.

Derek Right on. We will see you next time.

Tucker Thanks.

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.

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