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Tracking The Loyalists
Golf Lessons for Radio

How is golf like radio? Both face key questions about how to grow in an ever changing world where consumers face vast entertainment choices and time constraints. Golf has invested enormous marketing efforts to attract new players by building on the phenomenal popularity of its "rock stars" like Tiger Woods and others. The World Golf Foundation initiated the GOLF 20/20 program to harness its industry unity to grow the game. They envisioned creating 27 million new golfers and doubling the annual rounds played by 2020. However, a 2007 Wall Street Journal article stated that, "it may be time for golf to rethink its approach to the green." Despite the millions of dollars invested, “the total number of rounds played declined in 2002 and 2003 and has not recovered much since,” according to the records-keeping National Golf Foundation. Even more striking: Last year, for the first time in decades, more courses closed in the U.S. than opened.
Horse-racing tried a similar strategy about 10 years ago. "The idea was if they could just come up with the right slogan, 20-year-olds would drop their skateboards and come out to the track," says Steven Crist, the chairman and publisher of the Daily Racing Form. But it didn't work. "Racing has always been an activity for slightly older people. It takes time and a certain amount of disposable income to play."

'Avid' golfers make up 23% of the players, while they contribute 63% of the revenue. Where have we heard that before?		Now there is a call for a change in golf’s long game: focus on the people who matter -- those who already like golf and are the heavy users. "Any practical business needs more time with its current customers than in wooing potential customers. It's a more efficient way of doing business," says Joe Steranka, the CEO of the Professional Golfers' Association of America.

Currently there are 28 million golfers in the U.S., and about half of them are what the National Golf Foundation calls "core players" because they play 8 or more times each year. More specifically, NGF labels “avid golfers” as those that play 25 or more rounds a year. While" avids" make up only 23% of all golfers, they generate 63% of the revenue. [ Interestingly, this proportion is almost exactly the same as the significance of P1's to ratings. While P1's make up about 20% of the cume, they generate two thirds of the ratings.] "Increasing the [purchase rate - amount and frequency] among existing consumer categories is much more efficient than attracting and retaining new demographics," says Jim Koppenhaver, a former marketing executive at Kraft Foods who now is the head of Pellucid Corp., a consultant to the golf industry. That changes the whole central question of marketing from how do we attract new people to what's keeping our current consumers from using more. Golf discovered that there were a number of issues that keep golfers who have the desire to play more often from doing so. The game is inherently difficult, and in recent years it has become more expensive. Two-income families face an ever-increasing time crunch. Fathers want to spend more time with their families. Given the objective of converting core golfers to avid golfers, the list of solutions flows directly. 1) Make the game easier to play. Create clubs (woods and irons) that don't impose elite level performance limits. The vast majority of amateurs can't swing well enough or consistently enough to even remotely threaten the integrity of the game. 2) Speed up the game. The core players don't have all day Saturday or Sunday any more. Shorter-than-standard "executive" courses take an hour or two. In addition, an idea is to build courses with three six-hole loops, rather than the traditional two nine-hole loops. Players could play rounds of six, 12, or 18 holes, depending on how much time they have. Yet another idea is two-ball play where a foursome divides into two teams of two, using one ball each. While the solutions will be different, the challenges and perspectives faced by golf and radio are similar. Both have a similar pattern of a core group driving the majority of consumption. Golf has realized that not all consumers matter. Their new focus is to increase the loyalty among those core users-the right WHO. That focus provides a clear direction on what to say and how to motivate those consumers. As radio marketers, we too have the opportunity to focus on those that matter and target our marketing strategies to connect and interact with those consumers. That focus will be even more important in a PPM world. We'll have more insight into the relevance of those who matter in the upcoming release of the new white paper on radio preference and loyalty.

For more information, email Tripp Eldredge or call (859) 655-9200, ext. 103. dmr regularly updates our site with important new ideas and applications for marketing. Be sure to check back each month to get our latest insights and how they apply to the broadcast industry.