EPISODE 89

Derek I agree, and I think that it starts with, I don’t know, being really honest and reflective with this situation. You and I were talking before we hit record about a club that we’ve had some conversations with. And sometimes there’s a disparity between some of the people in the leadership who know, like for the health of the organization, that they either need to fill out the membership. Or they need more members versus the board, or some individuals on the board, or a member side that says, No, we’re fine. We don’t need more members. I like it just the way that it is. If there are more members, that means I’m going to have a harder time getting dinner reservations. I had a conversation recently with a GM who does have a wait list, and I said, Well, how many more spots do you think you need to fill? And he said, It depends if you ask me or the board. He said, The board might say we’ve got five open spots. He goes, financially, I think we need 15.

Tucker And that difference can be telling when you talk to a board and talk to the GM and really hear the way that they perceive the offering. And I think that’s because the board normally takes this angle of, well, we’re members. We’re trying to do what’s best for members. And the GM almost always has members in mind for sure, but they view this as we need to be a healthy business. We need to make sure that we keep moving forward, and we have the finances to do the things that our members want to do. But when we see inquiries drying up, waitlist shrinking, maybe events just aren’t as attended. Maybe your member/guest just isn’t as coveted as it used to be, or things like that. For me, that tells us that the market is saying something without saying something. People say things with their dollars. They say things with their interests. There’s so much stuff going on in today’s world that if you’re not being paid attention to, then that’s someone telling you that you’re just not interesting. And your story might not be clear, it might not be compelling, or it might not be different enough to stand out in this space that tells someone, Hey, this is some place really special, you should come and check it out. 

Derek So many clubs are telling the same story that they’ve been telling for years and years and years, and their members are new. Or these prospective members that we’re talking about, the data shows that they’re a different age group, they’re a different demographic, they have different expectations. We see it all the time. The example that we pick on all the time is the story that’s always based on history. And that story is just not resonating with this new market that you’re going after. 

Tucker This slowdown to me is the perfect moment for people to step back and assess how the club is positioned in the minds of prospects. So there’s the positioning of your club on how we are thought of within our current membership for sure, but there’s also the new people that are coming in the door, how do they think of us and how is that different than maybe the people who’ve been members for 20, 30 years? And how we make sure we’re tailoring that position, that story, so that we’re thought of in the right way moving forward can be telling. I think we’ve done plenty of projects in which we do surveying across the membership. And you hear, oh, everyone who’s been here for 15 years thinks of the club like this, and everyone who has been here for two years thinks of the club like this. And those are completely different. It has to do a little bit with generation, but it has a lot to do with how they thought of the club when they entered it. And that makes a huge difference in how they grow and capitalize on new prospects. 

Derek And growing, too, means looking beyond your neighborhood or even your zip code. And if you’re a seasonal club, if you are a club in Florida or Southern California, and the majority of your members live up north for half the season, you already know this. But I think even clubs here in our community have an opportunity to think outside not only their zip code, but even maybe the city itself, and look at the nation. The way that people are traveling these days and moving around, national memberships are a really growing opportunity. It’s interesting because we’re saying the word market and market and market, and now we’re going to explain why this is branding and not marketing, which is exactly what it is. So many people are going to default to, we just need to keep telling the story. We just need to keep marketing that story, but we’re gonna take a step back and talk about how we get that story right. 

Tucker It’s not about just taking what you currently have and making more people see it. That’s not the problem. People see it. It just doesn’t resonate with them is basically where we’re going. And in a competitive market, we feel a brand really opens the door for a club. It makes someone say, All right, tell me more about that place. What’s going on over there? I want to see, I want to know more about where they’re going or what they’re doing. That’s really interesting. And when clubs lean into this and have a compelling brand during this moment of slowdown, it kind of gets them back on the radar. It makes them feel like, all right, we have a reset here. Here’s where we’re going, all this other stuff. And they often come out ahead of that work to say we have a clear understanding, we have a sharp identity, we understand where we are going. We know who we’re for, which we’ll get into, but that’s really, really big. And it becomes less generic, like you’re saying, it’s not just club generic. We’re not just going to say we have a great golf course and we have great dining. We’re going to talk about what really makes this place special. 

Derek Instead of continuing to tell the same story or spin a different version of the same story, and just think of it as an awareness campaign by just repeating the same thing over and over, which actually does work in some advertising circles. Think of that radio jingle that you hear all the time, you know, for those of us in the demographic who still listen to the radio on occasion. Instead, let’s focus on, like I said before, taking a step back and getting to what it is that actually makes your club special. So that we can lean into that, branding is building your reputation. Branding is taking what is unique and special about you and wrapping that up in how people not only think of you, but experience you. Think of the story that you could be or should be telling at your next member/guest. Because every one of those guests is a prospect for you, and you’ve got a captive audience at that point too. 

Tucker And any club that comes to us with this challenge of new member interest has dried up. What is one thing we can do? What is one kind of project that we can work on that’s maybe not rebranding the entire club over a 12-month span? I look at that member/guest and I say, if that is your biggest tournament of the year and that’s when you get the most new people, new eyes on the club, let’s focus on building that out really nicely and build a brand for it that really kind of feels special and feels different and allows you guys to have full confidence in welcoming guests into the club and saying, We’re going to really wow people here. But what you’re saying is we don’t want to spin up a new story. This isn’t about changing you for who you are, but it’s really about uncovering what makes your club special, turning that up, and then making sure it’s clear and obvious to people outside of the club. But I also think it’s really important that that becomes clear and obvious to the people inside the club. We go back to boards. There are plenty of times when we talk to a board and they think, here’s what makes us special. Our 18 holes of golf make us special. That might be true for 15 clubs in the country. There aren’t many clubs that I would say your 18 holes is the only thing that makes you special, or that is it. That is all you need in order to get members in the door. So what’s really important is having this focus, but articulating that focus so that everyone internally also goes, Yeah, that is what we’re all about. Yes, that is where we are going. I’m excited about that. Let’s keep going that way. 

Derek You know, even shifting to business, corporations, I think the ones that are the most successful are doing a really good job of not just hiring people who are highly skilled for the roles that they’re looking to fill. They’re looking for people who are a cultural fit, who fit the values of that organization, who make them a team that’s working under a unified vision, and Clubs have the opportunity to do that same exact thing. Instead of just opening your doors for anybody and everybody, you said it before, part of this is deciding who you’re for, and then to be proactive and purposeful instead of just taking anybody who has the means. But instead, find those people who are excited to be part of what it is that your organization is doing, where it’s going, and what it’s all about. Because when those people join, they become stewards and advocates and recruiters. And before you know it, you’ve filled out that waiting list with more people who are exactly the type of people that you want more of at your club.

Tucker Some people are willing to go to bat for a brighter future, some people are willing to say, No, we need to invest in this if we feel like we are going to be better than we are today. Every great organization needs the people inside who really rally and kind of challenge the mindset of doing things the way we’ve always done things. So for us, it’s really important that we have those people, but it’s also an opportunity. So what happens when we don’t take that opportunity? So if we don’t do any of this, and new member interest is slowing down, and things just aren’t going well for us, and we do nothing, what does that look like for us? 

Derek Sometimes the missed opportunity is being reactive instead of proactive. It’s like trying to plug a hole in a boat and shoveling the water out faster than the boat is sinking. You know, sometimes when new member interest slows, it’s like a knee-jerk reaction, or it becomes a short-term fix instead of the long-term solution. Short-term things like we’ll discount our initiation fee, or we’ll let multiple families split the initiation fee. Think about the brand perception, the story that you’re telling in the market. By now, you’re the value option or the cheaper or the discounted version. It also includes the missed opportunity in the short term, or doing things like I mentioned before, which is assuming that marketing solutions or short-term promotions are going to be the long-term fix, or just relying on doing nothing and just hoping that word of mouth and that the people that are happy inside your organization are doing the work on your behalf, but without actually encouraging them or harming them with the right tools. 

Tucker Building perception for a club can be thought of if you ever cut a tree, or you see this tree stump, and you see all those layers of every season, you know it grows differently, and how does that work? We’ve seen through data the years in which someone might discount their initiation fee, or they might bring in multiple people underneath the same initiation fee, or they do some of that discounting, whatever. You see the bands of the tree are thinner that year. We actually see the data that says those people think of the club worse, and they tell people about it in a negative light or a worse light than the people who come in at this other rate, who believe in the club in a different way. Perception is such a funky thing. It’s so delicate when you say, we’re gonna discount all of our initiation fees, and we’re going to bring in this whole new generation of people who think of us as a discounted club. That changes everything. Because then, when those people get on the board, that’s how they think of you. And they make decisions based on that. So that doesn’t just go away. That just kind of gets cemented into your tree trunk of what does that look like? Where are we faulting, and where are we going? And we’ve seen it where you have really thick bands, right? You have these great members for a long time, then you have a couple of thin ones where it’s like, oh, we’ve kind of cheaped out. And then we go back to thick again, and those thin groups come in for less money, and they do all that stuff. They become the cultural challenge to get over because they disagree with everything, and they don’t want to spend the money on certain things, and they don’t agree that our service standards should be like this. And that’s where we see a lot of rifting within culture and memberships. 

Derek I get that things happen in the market over the years, and pandemics, and recessions that might kick in that survival mode instinct. And I think that’s where maybe the discounting and letting people split memberships come in. There’s a club that we work with that went through that exact same thing, and it’s taken them almost 10 years to get on the other side of that and to basically earn their perception back or to re-decide who they’re for. As you commented, that thin band takes a long time to repair or replace and get it back to a thick, strong one. So let’s jump to what goes wrong. People are missing these opportunities. What are two or three things that we see happen most often? 

Tucker We kind of already talked about one of them. There are really three that we would lean into. One would be an inconsistent perception. Like we said, some people think of us differently. Being inconsistent is not just bad when it comes to, well, we have different members who think about us differently. That’s fine, but it also creates market confusion to say, there’s a whole group of people that think of our club like X and there’s whole group that think of our club like Y, and what happens is that those people feel like they might hear other people talk about the club and think differently. And then they just go, I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know what’s going on here. I don’t know what’s doing that. But the other one that I would lean into is losing market visibility. It’s easy to get overlooked. When you do nothing for so long, you become kind of this piece of history that sits over on the shelf, and no one looks at it. No one talks about it. And you gather dust and all of those other things. And maybe competitors that have newer amenities and have newer things that are going on and news to talk about attract more people, and they have something to talk about. And that is big for them as they keep going forward. And then the third one is just sending the wrong message, doubling down on certain things that just don’t match your values. We can spend all of our days investing in the tennis courts, but if the tennis courts don’t represent who our future members are and who we’re really trying to get after, is that the best investment? Now we’re putting money into something that might not work. Just an example, but something to consider. 

Derek Or you’re continuing to repair the tennis courts for an audience or a membership that doesn’t play tennis that wants pickleball now, and you’re overpaying a tennis pro, and you’re continuing to put out all these tennis programs because you’re trying to ramp up a program that literally just isn’t relevant to your membership at this point in time. 

Tucker We see it all the time within clubs in which they basically appeal to the lowest denominator. Is that one person correct, or is that one person just the loudest in the room, and they have a different vision for this club than everybody else does? 

Derek We talked a little bit about this in a recent podcast about how reputations have faded, sometimes in part because the club just rested on their laurels of a great reputation for so long, but stopped nurturing it or amplifying it or moving it forward or evolving it that you end up just kind of fading away. You risk becoming irrelevant. The risk is worse than that. You risk going out of business. Because if you don’t have a healthy membership, then you don’t have a club. So I think as we shift towards the solve of this, we’re back to branding. We’re back to modernizing. It doesn’t have to be a wholesale change, but it’s now shifting back or evolving in a way that we’re being really thoughtful in not only landing on that new story, but now telling that story in the right way. So, how do we get it right?

Tucker There are a couple of steps that we take as we go through this. And I’m going to use the word market again, even though you’re not happy about it. The conversation around understanding what’s going on outside of your club is important for us. While we believe that you can make a lot of changes within the club, there’s just an important way of looking outside and asking, what is working? What’s happening? What are other clubs doing? How are they talking about themselves? What story they are not telling is really important. Understanding where the white space is for us. Where can we go? What is something that this market just doesn’t really offer? There’s not a perception there. And then how do we take what we do and actually match that? There has to be some truth to that. But when we go through this, it’s not about copying other people. It’s really about figuring out, OK, what unique parts of us and where is the white space and then how do we connect those two things and how do we meet that opportunity where it’s at and meet the moment and and try to move our club forward by kind of maybe even shifting it slightly into a different perspective. 

Derek I love the sentiment of not copying others. I think paying attention to what other organizations are doing well is a great addition to your overall leveling out your understanding, and helps you understand what everybody else is doing. But copying and being “me too” is the equivalent of being the Burger King in the mix that’s across the street from the McDonald’s. And McDonald’s is crushing it and has the better real estate. I guess it is a sustainable position if it’s like being second best is something that you want to do, but I think that that’s not what we’re aspiring to. 

Tucker But even then, I would argue that Burger King has a brand position, and it’s to be that second. There are a lot of people in the club industry who don’t want to say they want to be second. But that is still a position to have. But you can’t think like you’re the best option in the market if you’re really the second, and that’s the position you want to take. So there’s this balance of saying, own that and move it forward, and kind of build a brand around that. Instead of saying, No, we are the best, trust us, we’re the best. And everyone’s like, they’re not the best. Don’t listen to them. They’re not all of that. And that’s where we see a lot of successful people outside of the club industry who become board members have a really hard time admitting that they might be at a club that’s not the best club in the market and admitting that we don’t have to be the most premier club in the market to have a successful club. And that can be a really, really hard shock to the system for some people. 

Derek It might not be the best club by somebody’s definition within that market, but it might still be the best club for them. It still might be the club that that person really finds belonging and value in. And they’ve landed there. This is part of this whole process of kind of leaning into how to get it right. It’s because they’ve defined what’s made them different. You know, really getting to the soul of branding itself, which is looking inward and understanding what it is that we offer at our club that is different. I think some clubs understand that they’re unique in some ways. I think other clubs get kind of stuck in that competition of amenities, and it’s back to comparing ourselves with others, and they’re talking about the physical things that they have without truly understanding what’s unique about them. 

Tucker Best is such a subjective thing. You know, I can be best at a lot of things, in my opinion. And that’s just what it is. Other than pure sport where you would say, I am best at my club in golf because my handicap is lower. That’s pretty objective. This is how we do it. But even then you would say best could be changing from the best score, or you have the most fun, or you’re the best sport at it. So there’s this level of what we do isn’t necessarily to change your business model, but change the lens in which you look at your business. And the club being a business is to say, what is that shift in story that we need to have for ourselves to be more confident? And how do we build this so that we say, Yeah, that is what we’re all about. That’s how we do that. And what we do moving on to step two is to really lean into defining what makes us different in a really, really clear way. Is it a culture? Is it our history? Is there a location? Maybe it’s our social programming, or maybe it’s just the people that we attract are extraordinary in their own way, and what do they like, and how do we do that. If you don’t clearly define what makes you different, prospective members won’t define it either. They’ll just say, Oh, that’s just another club. And so what we try to do is build that differentiation through visuals, through all of these other things. So when we say we’re branding something, it’s not to say, Well, we’re going to take your monogram and just make it look nicer. What does it need to look like in order to tell our differentiated story for ourselves? 

Derek And that takes you to step three, which is now crafting the brand around that story that you’ve started to uncover, rather than the mistake that everybody makes. This is true in the club industry, this is true in the corporate world, this was true in sports, sports teams, sporting goods, where people jump to telling a story without having done those first two steps. They haven’t looked inward. And they haven’t looked outward. They don’t understand their market other than trying to maybe mimic or copy what somebody else is doing, and they haven’t taken the step of really doing the hard work of figuring it out. And when I say hard work, it’s to uncover that gem, that gold, that is what we do that nobody else does, or what we have that nobody else has here, so that we can then start to tell a story that’s meaningful and that’s effective and that’s intentional and purposeful and aspirational. 

Tucker And for me, when we go to a lot of conferences for private clubs, we talk to a lot of people about their club and what’s going on. And there are plenty of people who go, Oh, that’s what you do. Well, we don’t need that. We already rebranded, and that’s totally fine. And I’d say, Oh well, what’s changed? And they would say, Oh, well, we just updated our logo. And I would say, But what changed? Like what’s different about the club now? Or how do you think about yourself differently, or any of that stuff? They go, Nothing. We just kind of updated our logo. That’s a rebrand for us. And I think that that’s the hard sentiment that people don’t quite understand is that a brand modernization or a brand refresh or even a rebrand isn’t just taking your current stuff and making it look nicer, but the same. To really reframe how you think of your club and reframing that story in a new way is to say, No, something has changed here and we’re going to talk about it and showcase that in this new, fresh, different way. And that’s just this huge disconnect between refreshing and redoing our brand versus just like standard upkeep is kind of where we’re going. 

Derek A new logo without having done the work of uncovering your story – we should have mentioned that in the short-term fixes. That’s a short-term marketing play that might get you a little bit of traction for a little while. It might sell a little more merch, but when everybody realizes that everything else is the same, it just has a new symbol on the Pro Shop. That’s gonna fall hollow really, really quickly. 

Tucker The last thing would be once you’ve done all that hard work, you’ve defined your story, you’ve crafted a brand around that, you’ve done that. How do you reintroduce your club and how do you do it with confidence and what do you do? And this changes. We have a whole episode around launching a brand, and when you talk about that. Go listen to that episode if it’s of interest to you. What I would say is it’s not one size fits all when we talk about reintroducing a club. When we say something’s changed here, here’s this new story we’re looking at, and for internal and external audiences, that might look different. That might be really quiet, like we’re going to refresh everything, but we’re not going to talk about it. That might be a big splash, a big, wow, we’re gonna do a big campaign that really has things outside and inside of our club change with an announcement and really make a big deal about it. For every club, it’s different, but what has to be done is to have a clear alignment with where we’re going. And the part that we see people want to do, their gut reaction is always, Well, we have this new message that we want to put out. Let’s just throw it on our website and just call it good. But that doesn’t change how we go about it. Does that website message get communicated to all the membership people? How does that get shown to new prospects when they walk through the facility? How do you feel that has been integrated into how people hear and learn and see the club? So for us, it’s to be way more meaningful when it comes to applying this new identity and applying this new idea across different areas. 

Derek The two words that I hear the most in talking to clubs who are having some issues and they’ve traced it back to their brand is a lack of cohesion and a lack of consistency in how their brand is expressed and how it’s communicated and how they use their tools. And I get that the brand should be those two things, but to jump on this point of reintroducing your club with confidence, if you have the confidence to reintroduce your brand in a cohesive and consistent way, you’ll have much more success than in adding another C, confidence, compelling, clarity, we’re doing some alliteration today, makes it compelling. So cohesive and consistent are great, but if you’re cohesively and consistently telling the same old, boring, wrong, outdated story, and you’re cohesive and consistently stamping the same, old symbol or logo on everything, if there’s actual change and evolution that’s happening, then we add in that layer of making sure that it’s compelling. Because if it is compelling, that’s when it breaks through, that’s what it stands out, that when it grabs somebody’s attention, attracts people, and engages with them in a way that will help your brand take that step. It’ll help make this a brand and not a marketing exercise. 

Tucker So let’s close this. When member interest stalls, when we are not getting more people in the door, our wait list has now dried up, there’s just not as much interest in our club anymore, for us, that’s not a sign that your club has lost any value. It’s a sign that the market might have lost an understanding of what makes you special or have clarity around the difference in the great value that you do offer. And it’s important to think of this as our issue is probably not our golf course, it’s probably not our facilities. It might be every once in a while that problem, but most of the time, we don’t have a compelling answer to someone saying, What’s different about this place? And that’s what we’re trying to do is be strategic and focused and bring that focus to a club. 

Derek It helps your club communicate. It helps it do so in a way that differentiates. It takes the vision that you have and it starts to express that in a way that stands away and maybe has people now comparing themselves to you instead of you comparing yourself to another club. And it sparks way more. It’ll even spark more interest and engagement with your current members. And as we’ve learned through the data, your new members are the ones who are doing most of the work of recruiting your new members. So let’s make sure that they’re feeling aligned with this brand. 

Tucker And when you’re doing this really well, the brand’s going to help you grow in the right direction. A lot of clubs want to grow. They want to sustain themselves. They want to have that great kind of future. A lot of people look at the past and say the good old days, right? Like, Oh God, this club used to be great in the sixties. This club used to be great in the eighties. I remember when this was great. Our goal is to say, That’s the future. How do we take that and move forward? How do we build that so that we get the right people moving in the right direction to grow this place for the long term? And any great culture will tell you that the reason why culture is so great and exciting is because the future is brighter than the past. And that’s what gets them really excited. 

Derek Yeah, love that. It’s a great sentiment. That’s why we named this podcast Brands Made Meaningful. It’s that intentional, active, purposeful way of setting that foundation, telling it thoughtfully, pivoting when the market evolves while still being true to yourself. But if there’s anything that I would take away from this conversation, it’s making sure that you’re looking to attract not just people, but the right people. 

Tucker Good conversation. Until next time. 

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.