EPISODE 85

Tucker But sometimes, when perception changes and fades away, and a club doesn’t evolve, it can be because of two things. And we’ll get into those two things throughout this conversation. But really what I want to talk about is that declining reputation isn’t the end for clubs. It doesn’t mean we’re on our way out or we’re sunsetting our membership. For us, it’s a signal. It’s an invitation to reflect, to reset, to reassert our value and how that’s special in this marketplace to our membership. And today, I want to make sure that we cover how branding helps you reclaim that status, realign those perceptions that might have been fading, and reposition your club for the next generation, for what’s right today, but where you’re going. Where is this aspirational place that we’re trying to head? 

Derek The topic is relevant for us because, in our opinion, in our point of view, your brand is your reputation. How people think of you, whether it’s real or perceived, how people think of the experience of you how people talk about you, that is your brand. That is really the heart of the whole brand initiative, why somebody would do branding. So that’s why I think it’s super relevant. What I like about this topic is that this is an opportunity, instead of basically telling and talking about how or why somebody’s reputation may have declined. We’ll touch on some of those points. What I think is a positive about this is there’s an opportunity if you are, I don’t know, either brave enough to foresee that there’s a reputation issue, or you’re now realizing that you’re having some sort of a decline in your reputation. That’s an opportunity so that when you feel like you’re losing ground, whether it’s how your members think about you or talk about you, or how the market or prospective members think about you, instead of thinking about all of those as a failure or as problems, the truth is you can think of that as an opportunity to do something about it intentionally. 

Tucker So let’s talk about that opportunity. When a club is starting to feel like it’s losing ground, whether member sentiment is changing or maybe even market relevance is changing, it’s easy to view that as a failure. But for us, we view that as a turning point. 

Derek Think about the cues. We call them the red flags, the signs. First of all, short of a catastrophe or some very specific sort of incident, this usually doesn’t happen overnight. This happens quietly over time. It could be things like your member referrals are slowing down. You don’t have a wait list anymore. Prospective members who maybe typically would be considering you are instead considering other clubs or even joining other clubs. And internally, you might even hear your own members comment, It just isn’t the way it used to be around here, or I wish we would do something about that. Or you might hear your members with the inability to talk about their club to their friends or their colleagues in a way that helps you reinforce the positive reputation that they want. There’s a statistic that says that 80% of new members who are referred come from your members. And so if your members don’t have the ability or aren’t able to talk about your club in a positive way, that is a strong sign. 

Tucker So these signals that happen for us to say those are, and some might say warning signs, others might say great opportunities, that call themselves out and raise their hand to say, Hey, now is the time to relook at who we are and evolve where we’re going. Trying to understand where the club is today is one part, but really, where it wants to go is the opportunity. When you hear people say, This just isn’t what it used to be, to me, that’s a perfect opportunity to say, What should it be? Not what should be back in the past, but what made it so great in the past? And how do we make that feel like that again for this new generation? And how do we do that? And so what we’re talking about is refreshing that perception. How do we refresh our perception? How do we realign our members? How do we reclaim this position in a marketplace? If we still want to be this great place in this marketplace, then where is that, and how do we claim that, and then how do we re-energize people? How do we get people more excited about things? To your point, how do we get our new members to want to get even more new members in the door? And it’s really about figuring out how our brand helps us do that. And I want to stress that brand work is more than just the visuals. It’s more than just the optics that kinda come across with, oh, you guys have updated your logo, or maybe you’ve updated your colors. This work is really about clarity, about figuring out why your club matters and what role it needs to play in the future. 

Derek I think it’s also not about marketing tactics. It’s not about jumping ahead to an advertising or marketing campaign that has the intention of recruiting new members. Because you and I would then challenge somebody to say, well, what is it that that marketing campaign is going to communicate? What is the language? What’s the story that you’re going to tell? So this is where you have an opportunity to make sure that you have that clear, compelling brand foundation so that you can communicate what is unique and special about your club, why somebody should consider your club, and why it matters. And to do so in a way that allows them to see themselves in the future of your organization. We all have great golf courses – your name brand golf course, your Donald Ross, A.W. Tillinghhast, or McKenzie. So if those things are apples to apples, if the golf courses are all outstanding, then what? Then what is that brand differentiator? We always say your brand is not your logo. I also believe, I think we believe, that your brand is not your golf course architect or your 18 holes, your 27 holes. That’s marketing benefits and features instead of the actual foundational elements that really truly make you unique. 

Tucker So, reputation decline is a symptom. We talked about problems and symptoms. You go to the doctor when you have a cough, you don’t go to the doctor and tell them what disease you have. For us, when someone comes to us and says, our reputation is declining, that is a symptom of a different challenge. For us, we say, okay, then that means that our position is not relevant. We’re not being aspirational enough about who we want to be. Or maybe we’re not competing with the right people, with those who are gaining ground on us. And so for us, this reflects where we want to go and the conversation around how we do that. But I also want to talk about what happens if you do nothing? What happens if you see all these signals, but you don’t change at all? I think that happens all the time, where people don’t take it seriously, or they assume it’s just a down moment in the economy, so that’s why our referrals are lower, or there’s something going on that’s out of our control. So we can’t do anything about it. Let’s just stay the course, and we’ll be fine. What happens then? 

Derek That’s the equivalent of the slice that I battle with in my golf game. I just assume that without taking lessons, without practicing, without putting in any work, that one day I’m just going to show up and magically, just out of the blue, this wonderful thing’s going to happen and my slice is going to be gone. You have to do this on purpose. You have to be intentional about this, and the longer that you wait, the longer that you resist taking action, then you start to risk that symptom trending towards becoming a problem. 

Tucker You kind of risk becoming invisible in that marketplace. You become irrelevant. You don’t want to be the club down the street where people go, Oh, that’s still open or people still belong there? That’s amazing. That is probably the worst place to be. And if you don’t figure out what you want to be and where you want to go versus where you’ve been, that’s a huge challenge here. And I think that it comes into play when you look at investments. Where Clubs make great investments in service, amenities, renovating their spaces, and their facilities, all of these great things, but if your brand doesn’t really reflect these improvements on where you want to go, and you still hold on to the past, I don’t think people connect the dots. Members and prospects don’t really connect the dots of, Where are these benefits? Oh, we’re different. Oh, something is new here. Something has changed. And that makes it really hard for them to realize these clubs, the investment, the whole potential that they’re putting into their course, their facility, all of these great places. 

Derek This happens a lot. It’s really easy to be super focused on various components of your organization, and you literally blink your eyes and years go by, and then you wake up one day and realize that there’s an issue. You wake up to realizing your visuals of your brand are now outdated, that the messaging that you’ve been using that’s on your website that hasn’t been touched or readdressed, it’s actually causing confusion because it’s not even talking about your club in a way that is now relevant to all those amenities and renovations. Today’s memberships for many clubs look very different than they did five years ago. And so if we’re talking to our members or our prospective members today, those are different people than they were five years ago. So that whole kind of universe of language that we have needs to change. The same is true for our staff, making sure that the people who work with us, who are on our team, who are the face of our brand, who are interacting with our members every day, that they’re also not still describing our club to guests and prospective members in a way that’s outdated. 

Tucker And that inconsistency goes on the leadership level, too. We’ve worked with clubs before where someone might say, Well, our mission statement says this, and our members see that mission statement, but that’s not how we are at all. We say we’re for families, but we’re not for families at all. Imagine the confusion that comes in, whether you’re a staff member or you’re even a new board member, to say, So here are our guiding principles. Here’s how we’re moving forward. Here’s how we think about ourselves in this room as a club. But all of the members think about us completely differently. How does that connect, and how do we make really great decisions for this so that we grow and prosper in the right way? 

Derek We think about that inconsistency and that confusion. We’re talking about filling out the wait list, not attracting anybody, not having any marketing momentum. That’s absolutely an issue. But attracting the wrong type of members is also an issue. When you start taking on members who have the means to join your organization but maybe aren’t the best cultural fit or the type of people that you would see as ideal to nurture and help the future of your organization become what it is, that’s a serious problem. Because now you’re messing with culture. And you’re really into reactive mode instead of prevent defense, and basically risk losing control of your club and its story. 

Tucker And that can be really hard. When we look at memberships across generations, we’ll do generational analysis for clubs, and you can even see, Oh, this generation is really healthy. This one, maybe not so much. And then this next one is really healthy. And so you can see where these clubs have kind of weaned away from who they’ve always been where you have a whole set of members that don’t believe what everyone else believes because they were brought in under a different understanding because at that point, whoever leadership was, was not guiding the brand in the way in which they wanted to go. They didn’t have the right direction at that time. They didn’t know where they wanted to be. 

Derek I think we can kind of shift to what can people do? Your example earlier of that club that you drive by, or I’m thinking about a restaurant in my neighborhood, where instead of driving by that restaurant and saying, Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe that place is still open. I mean, I don’t even know that anybody goes there anymore. I don’t know how they exist. And instead shift that to, Look at that restaurant. Isn’t it incredible how that restaurant is still in business and how it’s still cutting edge and how it’s still evolving and attracting people to it because of its offerings, and how it continues to stay updated? It’s like, how can we take that sort of analogy and approach and apply that to clubs who might be having that same challenge? 

Tucker Yeah, the first, well, maybe not even step one, but step zero is admitting that there’s something that’s going on. That’s the hardest thing for clubs to do is just to admit that, you know what, something might not be right here. Members will admit it all day. But the club president, the GM, and some of the membership staff who really, really drive that sentiment, admitting that something is off can be hard for them. Step one from there is diagnosing it, understanding what has changed. This is done through member research or even market research. What’s going on with other clubs? What are they doing, and how are we compared to them? Comparing can be hard sometimes. And I would say sometimes it’s not right to compare clubs across things, but it’s good to understand what they are doing. What are they seeing success with? How are we then not seeing success, and in what ways can we learn from that can be great, but you can’t fix what you don’t fully understand. You can’t change things if you don’t really understand what that change looks like and what our members want, all of these pieces. 

Derek Then, back to this reputation, you clarify how you want your club, your organization, to be seen. Future thinking, aspirationally. And you can decide who you are and the way that you want people to be thought of. You can be very intentional. Again, I think that people jump to what we’ll talk about next. They jump to the exercise of writing or designing or doing marketing campaigns, and basically throwing darts at what the content is that they’re trying to communicate because they haven’t done the work of understanding first what that opportunity in the market is and taking the really big step of deciding who they are and how they want to be thought of. 

Tucker And that can be vision casting. That can be a candid conversation amongst the leadership around where this club is going and how we see this moving forward. That can be leveraging that member research and saying, Well, here’s what our members want us to be. Does that meet what the leadership feels as well, and how do we connect those two things so that we can build something we all have a shared identity about and want to move forward together with? 

Derek Then when you take that and you have that, that makes looking at your logo and your visual identity and your messaging and the tone and the attitude of how you look and how you express yourself – I don’t want to say it makes it easy, but it makes it strategic. It makes it so much more intentional and thoughtful and meaningful because you now have a set of guidelines and objectives that says we’re trying to make sure that how we sound and how we communicate is reflecting the perception that we want and the reputation that we’re working towards versus just guessing and doing a lot of what we would call throwing darts. 

Tucker And I think you get into people saying, I hate our logo. What we want it to be is not as easy as just saying, Well, what do you like? It’s not the same as buying a shirt. This is a bigger conversation around who we are, what our shared identity is, and how we are moving forward as a club, along with how we write. What are the first four words that land on our homepage? What are those? They should really represent this club in a positive light that people agree with in a shared setting to say, Yes, we all agree. That is what our club is all about. We’re excited about that. It gets us excited to go to the club. Now those are the kind of conversations that are important when deciding those refresh visuals. But then, once you’re done with all those three steps, activating all of that across all the internal places and external places, that’s where you get to what our website should look like. That’s where you get to, how do we do this member-guest tournament? What should our menus look like in the grill? What should all of these new member packets look like for people who are prospects walking through our grounds and potentially going to be the next generation of members? What does all that look like? It happens fourth on this list of things, whereas, to your point earlier, that’s where a lot of people want to start. They say, let’s do that first. That’s where you end up with, I would say, more club generic pieces like, Our golf course is great. We have great facilities. We believe in stewardship, and we believe in honesty. And that’s really vanilla – vanilla is fine – but vanilla can make it hard for you to stand out. It can make it hard for you to build a culture that is different and something special, and a place where members say, This is where I belong. This is somewhere that I feel like I can go and be myself. And I can go there and make memories that last a lifetime. And that’s our ultimate goal. 

Derek We would go back to our what a successful brand is formula with the combination of authenticity and relevance and the surprise that then ultimately delights our members. That’s not about faking it. It’s not about just fresh paint on the walls that is a short-term cosmetic change, when behind that wall, there’s mold or rot that needs to be addressed and cleaned out to fix it for the long term so that the structure is strong and safe. It’s about being authentic to you. A lot of the clubs that we talk with, I think at their core, they know that they’re unique but because they’ve been trained or default to talking about their amenities instead of their culture, at least a lot of the ones that we seem to come into contact with, they don’t realize how unique they actually are. To take this opportunity to figure out what the best version of what your club already is and uncover that and then leverage that, like we said, intentionally, I think that’s what’s going to make all those activations and implementations and marketing things effective because you’ve done the strategy groundwork first. 

Tucker When we work with clubs, what I try to express to them is that what makes you unique is most likely not going to be found on a balance sheet. It can’t be an asset. It’s not going to be things that you can put a value to. That’s what makes a club priceless. It’s not the amenities, and some people would say, well, it’s access. And yeah, it’s access to a point. A lot of them are offering access. And so we need to figure out what makes this place special. A lot of the time, it comes into culture, comes into service. It comes into a lot of those things, but it’s important for us to understand that. But when we look at when a club’s reputation really starts to slip, I think it’s important that a club understands that it’s not about making the big splash. The solution here is about understanding who you are and building alignment internally. When your reputation is changing, it’s because something is disconnected. There’s not a connect with where we’re going. You’re not aligned on where the next phase is. You’re just aligned with where it used to be. And that can be really, really challenging for a club. 

Derek There’s the sentiment about are we fixing our reputation? Is this damage control? Or is this being thoughtful in the evolution and the progression of who we are? No organization in any industry is going to survive by standing still and by hoping that doing everything the way that we’ve always done it is going to continue to be the way that’s going to help us be successful in the future. That evolution is unavoidable and it’s important to embrace it. 

Tucker And there’s a sense of, if you’ve ever been to an airport with moving walkways, we’re all standing on that moving walkway and it’s going the opposite way. So if we just stand still and do nothing, we end up going backwards with it. And even if we walk at a slow rate, we’ll just stand in the same place. And that’s okay, too. But a lot of clubs need to understand that the brand, your brand, and having a strong brand, we’re not just talking logo, but having a really strong brand, a sense of who we are, where we’re going, and expressing that brand really helps us evolve in the right direction. It helps us move forward. It helps us be excited about where we are going. And that’s what made most of these clubs’ legacies. What people say is the good old days. The good old days represent when you’re really excited about the next day, not necessarily about when you are excited about the day behind you, and that’s something that a lot of clubs need to work on. 

Derek You’re making the good old days today. You’re making tomorrow’s traditions right now. So let’s make sure that the reputation that you have is one that you’re fostering and leading and not just having to manage and hang on to. Let’s do the hard work. All right, good, let’s wrap there. If you’ve got a topic that you are interested in that you would like us to expand on from a brand perspective for your club, shoot us a note and let us know, and we would be happy to add that to the queue. Otherwise, until next time. 

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.