EPISODE 94

Derek You’re the one, you’re the listener.

Amy I’ll try to raise that number for you. Yeah, it’s great.

Tucker Amy, let’s start with your career. Just give a little bit of a background, kind of your journey, where you come from on a professional side. And then I also want to flip that from a club side and that perspective. We were talking a little bit offline beforehand, and I had to be like, Stop talking because what you’re saying is amazing. So dive into that a little bit.

Amy Sounds good. Well, you know, Derek did my career in the introduction. So thank you, Derek, for doing that. Like he mentioned, I’ve spent over the last 20 years leading brand development and activation, demand generation, and marketing strategy for companies in industries like fintech – financial technology – and healthcare. Saas, just so you know, Derek, is software as a service. So just a nice little acronym. But as you mentioned too, I built and managed global marketing teams at a Fortune 5 company, United Health Group, and at a smaller tech firm, Wex. I help create strategies that not only boost revenue, but they strengthen that connection and trust with the customers. To make a long story short, I’m super obsessed with just turning customer experience into a competitive advantage. Tucker, you asked a little bit about our experience at our club. My husband and I joined the Lafayette Club in Minnetonka Beach, Minnesota, it’s been 26 years ago, right after we got married. We looked at a lot of clubs in the area, and we landed on Lafayette based on social connections that we had. The location of the club was important. And the experience that we had when we visited the club – it was a great experience, welcoming. So what started out as a really great place to socialize and play golf quickly evolved into us being there literally every day in the summer for things like swim team, golf and tennis camps for our two kids, and literally it became an extension of our home. And the bill frankly reflected that, ha ha, from the Snack Shack, wink, wink. Anybody who is a club member understands that one, right? My husband served on the board for many years. He was a former club president. Our daughter discovered her love for golf at Lafayette’s golf camp, and she went on to play in high school. Staff members at LaFayette greet us by first name. They ask about our extended family. And to me, that’s not just service of the club, that’s about a feeling of belonging. So, by build brand loyalty for a career, we have like literally lived it at Lafayette.

Derek Building experiences, providing member experiences, is what the club business is all about. Like you said, fostering that sense of belonging. I think one GM we talked to actually said, My job is to create experiences and to help my members create memories. From the outside looking in, as a marketer, what role do you feel that a club’s brand plays in shaping that member experience?

Amy Well, now I’m going to preach to the choir a little bit, right? Because you guys are the experts. But what we all know is that a club’s brand is not just that little logo or the crest on a golf shirt. It’s all about the experience. It’s really the feeling that you get when you walk in the door of that club. Is the welcome that you receive warm? Is the environment inclusive? Does it feel like a second home, like I mentioned, because you’re really spending that much time and, frankly, that much money at a club? So you want it to be that special. You know, we’re all consumers. We always hear these terms B to B, B to C, B to B, B to C. Right? And, frankly, it should just be C to C right now, because we’re all consumers. And whether they realize it or not, members are constantly absorbing a club’s brand through the service, through the facilities, through the programming, or even the way the conflicts or feedback are handled. One of the most powerful moments that we experienced at the club was when our son was just five. He was swimming in his first swim meet. And just like a five-year-old should, he took forever to swim the length of the Olympic-sized pool. The other kids were done, and he was taking a while. But I’ll tell you what, a line of parents, not just my husband and I, but all the parents that were there to cheer the team on, followed him along the pool deck, cheering him on with every stroke he took. And to me, that was the brand, that is the brand of the club that we’ve experienced. And it’s just something you live, it’s not just something that you design.

Tucker I was wondering when you go C to C is really interesting to me. When I think of C to C as well from a club perspective, you think about how, and I tell this to general managers when they go, we need to sell more memberships, I’d say your members are your salespeople. Don’t rely on your communications manager who might reach out to people every once in a while. It’s the person who’s been there for 15 years who is going to be the best person to talk to their friends or even new people about what this club’s all about, here’s what we do here, here’s what it means to be a member here. And that really goes beyond what they would think of as standard marketing for the club. That gets to this new level.

Amy Yeah. I couldn’t agree with you more, Tucker. I mean, something that I’ve seen work really well in corporations and the teams that I have led is building cross-functional advisory boards to align not only across internal departments at an organization, and in this case, a club, but also those customer segments. So if you think about it today, clubs have four generations of members inside their four walls. Think about that. You’ve got grandparents, parents, 20-Somethings, and then you sometimes now have grandchildren, right? So you’ve got a great whatever that generational ladder looks like. You’ve got four generations you’re talking to. So for clubs today, a really simple solution would be to create, create some advisory boards of members made up from each of those generations. And really understand, take the time to deeply understand, what those desires are across every one of those things and everything that your club offers, because that’s gonna really lead to long-term retention.

Tucker Right. And if you don’t do a good job of understanding what that next generation wants, I can’t tell you how many times we’ve interviewed next generation of family members and they go, Well, I don’t want to be a member there because that’s my mom’s club. That’s an older person’s club because the club doesn’t do a good job of looking to the next generation. They’re so focused on the member of today that they forget about the member of tomorrow.

Derek Amy, think about your role, your marketing in a health care aspect, your audience is wide. But for a club with 300 members that spans four generations, the challenge of providing experiences that unify and are inclusive to all of those members. One of the things that we hear a lot of, what either club leaders or club members complain about, is that disparity of clubs that are overly focused on their super senior members or their brand new members. But even you, having been there for 25 years, think about how your own use of the club, expectations of the club, the transition from having a five-year-old go to swimming lessons to now hoping that that five-year-old who’s now 25 might be interested in actually joining someday. That’s not an unreal challenge for clubs to have to navigate.

Amy I completely agree. Our expectations as club members, even though it sounds like we’ve been there a long time, there are some who have been there for 50 years at Lafayette Club. So our expectations have absolutely evolved. I used to view the club as a place for family activities. And now I see it more as a place for connection and community. I want experiences that fit into our family’s life stages. So what you said, Derek, about really understanding who those customers are and those moments that matter is really important. In healthcare, like you mentioned, we would look at moments that matter within the healthcare benefit scenario. So if you think about a 20-something signing up for their first benefits package, how do you educate them to understand what’s important about benefits at that time in their lives? And then they move on to another moment that matters is when they get married, because then benefits change when you start to think about bringing a family on. And then you also do the same when you have children, or you have an unfortunate, catastrophic incident healthwise. So you think about those moments that matter. Club life isn’t really that different. It’s a lot more fun than benefits. Ha ha. But it’s not that different. What does it look like when you’re just joining the club? What did it look like to my husband and I when we were first joining as a young married couple starting out? What were our needs? Then what were our needs as we evolved into having a family? And now what are our needs as we look for that connection at a different stage in our lives?

Tucker And you’re kind of leading me down the next route of saying, how has your career given you this nice perspective on not only the challenge, but I would look at clubs as a thing that looks at maybe corporate entity and saying, well, everything in that world doesn’t apply to us at all because we’re so different and we wouldn’t use any of that. Are there any types of principles or strategies where you’d say that this really is the same one-to-one, you’re just not thinking about it because it’s not where you come from?

Amy Tucker, I think what I said earlier about consumer to consumer – I just can’t emphasize that enough with our access to digital marketing and everything we see in our face every single day. We’re all consumers, we’re all consuming like literally thousands of pieces of content every day. So, as you guys know, the most important step in any brand journey is to start with clarity. So you have to know who you are and you have to know what you’re for. You have to take the time to understand who your customers are. So, members in this case, what do they really care about? So we spend a lot of time in corporate marketing, segmenting and understanding our customers and target audiences. And if you don’t deeply understand their emotional drivers, if you’re a club, if you are Taco Bell, if you’re a big SaaS company, all the marketing in the world is going to fall flat. It just is. I talked about the advisory boards and how important that is. And another thing is really leaning on storytelling from current customers to help tell that story. That’s just really imperative. So you heard me talk earlier about the customer advisory boards. Take those advisory boards to the next level. So, just for instance, from Lafayette, Lafayette’s history is pretty remarkable. You guys know this, right? So it opened in 1899. We celebrated our 125th anniversary last year. I mean, U.S. Presidents have stayed at the club – like three, I think, like Arthur, Grant, Taft. Vice-President Stevenson, way back in the day. It was a major stop because it’s right on the railroad, and it’s really close to Minneapolis. It’s on the shores of Lake Minnetonka. It’s kind of a nice spot. It was known as a cool place for people to come on vacation. So during the anniversary celebration, the board and the club management did a really nice job of retelling our history to the current club membership. And they did a black tie event, and they did golf events. You guys are gonna like this. They included playing a round with hickory-shafted clubs, which I guess was a thing back in the day. And it was a great way to educate our membership about the rich history. But not every club has 125 years to talk about in digital marketing or try to create a sense of belonging in history. And it doesn’t really matter because they also have generations of – I’ll call it emotional capital – where members are learning to golf, like I mentioned earlier, or get married on the lawn or watch their kids grow up at the club, whatever it is, but hardly ever do I see a club, including ours, tell stories through their digital marketing from a member’s point of view. But if you started to tell some more of those emotive stories about the reasons why people are club members, I think that just really goes far with prospective members.

Tucker We’re talking about how clubs can evolve a little bit and the way that they figure out not only their marketing, but outreach and establishing an experience. And the argument is, in the old days – I’m going to say old days. I’m the youngest person here. In the old days, it would be like, I’m interested in joining a club. I’m going to call and set up a tour, and I’m going to go do that and all of those other things. And now the argument, like you just mentioned, is I’m going to do all of the research I possibly can. I’m actually going to rule a bunch of clubs out before I even contact any of them. And that’s where I get to it’s difficult now to rely solely on the experience at the club to be able to communicate what the club’s all about. I think that’s where a lot of clubs get this disconnect, but our food and beverage is so amazing. If they were just to come to our club, they would realize how great the service is. And my argument is, they’ve already ruled you out before they set foot on the property. That is where it’s really important to be able to establish: what is our story? What are we telling? How does that experience get expressed? Online? Sure. Through different elements. How do you get someone if I’m like, Hey, Amy, I want you to be able to be a member, but I want you to be so excited about what’s going on here that you’re like, I have to tell my friends about this? Like I would say, let’s go to Derek. You don’t feel like your job is to go and get new members for your club because you’re trying to enjoy the club. It’s a recreational place for you. You don’t want to feel like this is a job. And the difference is, is that I don’t think clubs need to make their members their marketing team, but figure out how they activate their members because they’re so excited to promote the club because of something so amazing happening there. I don’t think that happens by just doing what every other club is going to do. You need to find the special and make sure that every member understands that that is special. How do you do that? How do you activate members when they’re just trying to enjoy their time and relax?

Amy You know, Tucker, I think you touched on something. I think as a member and Derek, I’ll let you speak as well, I think we all have pride in our clubs. So I don’t think it’s a stretch to ask your members to help activate. I think being a club member is an investment, and you want your club to thrive. After spending 26 years there, we look at it as a bit of a family. And I mentioned it earlier. We looked at it as an extension of our home. I mentioned it before, like my daughter’s golf journey started at Lafayette. And that’s literally a story that we’ve personally shared a hundred times. And word of mouth from members is one of your strongest brand assets, obviously. Any brand. Word of mouth goes far. But clubs really should be more intentional about showcasing those moments and the stories, and invite members to be a part of that storytelling in their marketing. Share that pride that they have for their club. You know, nothing resonates more with a potential member than the stories that happy, fulfilled, loyal members share. I would never be offended by being asked by a GM, whose job it is, as Derek mentioned earlier, to create those experiences that matter and to make sure that people are happy, to have them be part of that storytelling journey. You know, brides getting married, have them tell their story about the experience they had on that magical day.

Derek You’re preaching to the choir, and you’re sharing a treasure trove of advice and ideas. One of the things that I find frustrating in working with clubs is – you come from a very sophisticated marketing background, from a business culture with an entire department and a staff that was entirely dedicated to digital presence, for example – in many of these clubs, the digital marketer, the membership director, the communications director, and sometimes even the GM might all be the same person or a team of two. And also your idea of the other committee, which I think is brilliant. On occasion, when Tucker and I are talking with our club clients, and we talk about putting together even a committee to navigate the brand, you can sometimes see the visceral reaction of committee fatigue. Where the GM, who is leading that, is thinking, Oh, here’s just one more thing. I’m already working 80 hours a week in the season. So I get that they’re spread thin. I get that they’re frankly much less sophisticated and behind the times of a lot of the things that I think we take for granted. Storytelling, for example. Leaning into the new members. There’s a statistic that says something like 85% of your new members are recruited by your current members within the first four or five years of their membership. So your new younger members are recruiting your new members. Are you intentionally and proactively giving your new members, those people that are advocates and excited and storytellers, the stories and the content and the tools and the resources to make sure that they are spreading that word to their friends in a very natural way, and maybe not in so much of a marketing way? But I think the more that we talk to clubs, the more that we see some visionaries who are excited about some of these new ideas and some of the next steps. But there’s a bit of a, it’s always been this way. This is a way we’ve always done it. And, luckily, that trend is starting to shift for this industry. But getting clubs to deliver on that brand promise and tell those stories is a real challenge for many of them.

Amy You know, frankly, corporate marketing is shifting quite a bit. So the world of having a 150-person team, which is some of the team sizes that I’ve come from, I hate to say it, but those days are probably over. And we’ve got so many tools at our fingertips that can help us do things seamlessly, that I would challenge anybody who’s thinking about marketing to really think about the things that you can stop doing and the things you should be focused on doing. So storytelling is critical right now to activating brand. And if you don’t do that well, you’re behind the boat. So I absolutely agree with you, Derek. I know people are strapped, but I think there are small things that people can do that will go far.

Tucker Right. I have a really interesting question for you, Amy. It comes down to – clubs are private. At their core, that is what they are. They are walled gardens. You’re not supposed to see in unless you are the chosen person to see in. That I think is a reflection of a really difficult part of their marketing. Think of social. When you go, what should our social look like? Because members don’t necessarily want everybody to be able to see what’s going on at the club because it is a private experience. So how do we publicly market and showcase who we are, what our story is, and what makes this place special, without degrading this idea of privacy and exclusivity, and that challenge?

Amy Yeah, it’s hard. In health care, we’ve got a little law in America called HIPAA, where you’re not supposed to share any details from a member’s experience. But I just can’t say it enough. If you have somebody who’s had a decent experience, whether it be benefits, fintech, or a private club, if they have enough pride in the experience that they’ve had, they will almost always want to share their story. It’s just the truth. So even if it’s just a member-guest day and somebody takes a photo from afar and shares it, and maybe just shares a caption that says something hurt on the course today. This is the best member-guest day I’ve ever been to. I mean, something like that. It doesn’t have to be like John Doe on the 13th hole with these three very prestigious guests, you know what I mean? You can think of ways to do it that are a little bit creative. But almost always, I think, included in the private scenario, unless it’s an ultra private private club, I think people would have pride in sharing that story.

Tucker So when we look at clubs, generally, we have some clubs that we’ve worked with that love to use things like social media, thinking we’re going to be really intimate with our members. We’re going to showcase all of these great experiences and tell everybody about it. And it’s not just, Hey, here’s what’s going on on Tuesday night. Not like, Oh, it’s Taco Tuesday, come to the club. It’s more like, look at this really cool swim meet that we had, and look at the winner, and welcome to the Johnson family because they’re new members, and all of these great things that they’re really intimate about. And then, flip side, we have member-oriented clubs that don’t want anything to do online. They don’t want anything out there. They want to be extremely private. And so our question is, why are some clubs so okay with the term marketing and understanding that to be healthy, they have to market themselves and have to be out there? And why are some clubs afraid of that? What do you think the balance is of looking like you need members?

Amy 25 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, the prestige of a club was enough to sell the club. But club members, generations, and expectations of membership have shifted. The desires of members now, the things they expect from clubs, are just different. So it’s almost just like the expectations of the members have evolved. Probably the folks working at the club, some of them have evolved to understand and embrace these modern concepts of marketing. So again, it used to be all about word of mouth. Joe at work belongs to Lafayette Club. So I have to too. But now it’s more than that. Now it’s about what I’m going to experience at the Club. And if you don’t do a good job of telling that story, and I guess if a club’s resistant to the word marketing, just consider it telling your story. It doesn’t have to be corporate marketing. But it’s about creating that emotive reason why people should become a part of the club and why they want to stay.

Tucker And to your point, clubs now deal with a very different, not to get into marketing talk here, but clubs nowadays deal with a completely different competitive set. There are gyms and there are different groups and things like that, where just to get some kind of social equity or building your social status, doesn’t just happen at private clubs anymore. And that creates this desire to go, wow, we’re going to have to not necessarily remake the way we think about clubs, but understand that it’s not the same as it was in the 60’s when my boss was a member here. So I’m going to be a member there so that I can have more time with them. And then I can kind of move the ladder like it used to be. And so this idea of we’re not just selling status all the time anymore. It’s a broader game than that, and that belonging comes in way more important than connection.

Derek Having a social presence is part of you intentionally fostering your brand’s reputation. Because, Amy, I’ve had experiences at clubs that I’ve heard about from somebody through somebody, that when I went to that club or had an opportunity to be a guest there, the experience didn’t align. I’ve had experiences that blew away what I expected and were way better than what I had heard, and I’ve also had experiences that were incredibly underwhelming based on what I had anticipated. So to allow that to be our reputation, we talked about logos and the visual component. But in a word, to me, brand is your reputation.

Amy Absolutely.

Derek And now maybe we don’t call social marketing, we just call social one more tool that allows you to be intentional with how your brand shows up in the world and the stories that you want to tell, so that people are thinking about you the way that you want them to. We just don’t call it marketing.

Amy I couldn’t agree more. If I can help generate two or three more listeners, ha ha, Derek, and anybody from my team is listening to this podcast, they’re going to roll their eyes. But I always lean on my Nordstrom example. Just bear with me, guys. Nordstrom does an amazing job of living their brand across all the interactions with them. So just think about that. So you walk into their store, and it’s probably one of the last retailers to do a really good job at greeting you and making you feel like they want you to be in their store. They do that through their emails. They personalize them and make you feel like they’re talking to you. They know who you are. You’ve been a longtime customer. They do that through their customer service. They foster this culture of exceptional customer service through consistency. And it’s all about the consistency. Not very much unlike the ever-changing landscape of what clubs are going through right now. Think about the retail landscape and how that’s changed so much. But I know what to expect every single time I walk into Nordstrom. And I literally almost don’t shop anywhere else. I always go back because I know that I’m going to get exceptional customer service. And I frankly feel like a sense of I know what to expect, and there’s that sense of belonging. It’s the same thing with a club. And like you said, if you don’t want to call it marketing, consider it just an investment in your future. Consider it an investment in how we create loyalty.

Tucker This idea of the landscape has changed, and the way that clubs are treated now is very different than it was in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, whatever you want to go to. And I’d say the flip side, the positive side, of that is the brands for clubs used to be built by the members. Who you had as a member established what you were as a club. And that was fantastic, and that worked really well for a long time. And I’d say the opportunity out there now is that the club actually has an opportunity to build its brand, whether or not a certain person is going to join with them or not. So my job now is to build a brand and really own that brand as a club and not be like you, John Doe member. Your job is not here to build my brand. It’s to be an evangelist for my brand and say, yes, I agree with that. I think more people should join this rather than it being like, I’m going to go get Tom Cruise to be a member here. And our club is going to hinge on his membership being here, or past presidents of the country were members here. And so that’s why people want to join and to say, our club now has the opportunity to establish who we want to be, so that when someone comes here, they think of the club, not the people who belong to the club as our brand. And that’s a really interesting kind of shift to this modern way of establishing yourself.

Amy That’s a good point. You guys touched on it earlier. There’s a lot of competition right now about places where we can spend our time. And frankly, if a private club can create a place where you can tick three of those boxes off, and create that stickiness – so great dining, great place to work out, great place for community to play golf. That’s going to keep me coming back time and time again. So you’re right. It’s about being inclusive. It’s about creating that community. It’s about creating relevant programming. Derek knows this. My 23-year-old daughter recently moved back from Dallas. And a big thing in Dallas right now, you’re gonna love this, is 23-year-olds play mahjong. Unbeknownst to me, Lafayette picked up on that trend and hired a Mahjong expert to come in and train us on Mahjong for four weeks straight. And I’ll tell you what, my 23-year-old daughter was the first one out the door every night running to the Lafayette Club. And that was a really cool example of creating another relevant moment for all of us to participate in. That was a great thing for her and I to do together. But they also stayed up on their trend. They understood that this was not only attracting an older set, but it was attracting a younger set. And it brought us back in the door again for four straight Thursdays, where, guess what, we spent money in the dining room. We really enjoyed some time together, and it’ll keep us looking for the next programming that Lafayette’s going to offer. So it’s really impactful.

Tucker And that competitive set, the clubs have such an advantage over some of these other places, right? Gyms or even restaurants that are not a part of a private club where you would go, your creative advantage here is that you have a space that is always there, it’s always consistent, but you can change with the times. And that gives you this kind of ultimate flexibility to add new programming rather than saying, well, here’s how we’ve always done it so we have to do it like that. Your opportunity is to say we can change with the times because we’re not stuck as being the supper club down the road that’s always going to be the supper club down the road because that’s just how it’s always been. And the more that clubs lean into that, I think the more successful they get at attracting that next generation.

Amy Yeah, couldn’t agree more.

Derek What I’m going to take away and what Tucker will hear me say to other clubs that we talk to now is that storytelling and things like your digital presence are something you should be investing in to nurture the reputation that you want in your market.

Amy When we talk about digital presence, Derek, sometimes people think about big, expensive marketing budgets at corporations, and frankly, organic social marketing is equally as impactful. When people are looking for you, the first place they’re going to look is either your website or your social channels, and posting something on your social channel doesn’t cost you anything. So don’t always equate it to being big-budget items. Digital marketing sounds so ominous and so big. It’s just not. So, organic marketing is probably more impactful for a private club than paid.

Tucker Amy, if someone is listening to you and they go, Wow, she sounds so smart, I think that I need to connect with her. I need to talk to her about something. Where can I do that? Where can someone reach out to you?

Amy Probably the best place would just be to find me on LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn. I also have a website, amydailey.co, not com, but amydailey.co, and you could find me there. I’m going to link this podcast to that site. So we’ll make sure that everybody can find this there too.

Derek Perfect, Amy, thanks for joining us today. Love your perspective, ton of awesome content advice. I learned a bunch today, and I hope this conversation inspires club leaders to think about their brand as an entire experience through that sense of place, through the emotional connections that you talked about, and through the stories that they and their members are telling every time somebody walks through their door or tees it up or visits their club. Because at its best, a club’s brand is about creating that place where people truly feel like they belong. We will catch you next time here on Brands Made Meaningful. Thanks, everybody. 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.