Andrew Wood, president of Legendary Marketing – The World’s Leading Expert in Golf, Resort, Hotel & Destination Marketing shares his reasons on why golf is slowly dying as a sport in public popularity. Reposted from his LinkedIn Blog
The economic meltdown of 2008 did not create the downturn in the golf industry it just happened to be the convergence point of many key factors which created the Perfect Storm. A storm that turns 10 years old this September.
1. First, you have an oversupply of courses fueled by the infamous National Golf Foundation’s edict to “Build a course a day to keep up with demand.” Oversupply causes price drops and business failures in any industry.
2. Add to this already worrying dynamic the number of courses built never intended to succeed as viable business entities. Instead used to inflate the price of homes, sell hotel rooms or in many cases a pure EGO PLAY. Case in point Adena, in Ocala a spectacular course which closed last week. In this part of northern Florida, you could easily build a course for five million but this billionaire owner who does not even play golf spent in excess of 50 million. Of course, he’s not the only one, despite picking it up “cheap” and with an acclaimed re-model to an already world-class course, Trump will never make a dime at Turnberry, amazingly he even admitted this himself! (According to corporate filings in the UK, Turnberry lost US$36.1 million in 2016 (the most recent figure available) on revenue of just US$12 million.)
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There are hundreds if not thousands of these ego courses that are not and never will be financially viable that none the less drain business from courses set up to actually cash flow. There are a few other businesses where you see this phenomenon like restaurants but not many!
3. Next, you have the aging of the population, aging beyond the point where they enjoy golf. At Black Diamond where I was a member for over a decade, the membership dropped from almost 600 to under 300 in the time I was there. Of the three hundred 60 of them where over 80 and at age 48 in 2010 when I quit I was one of 3 members under 50. The scratch group had gone from 40 plus players to 6 guys playing the senior tees.
The price of membership during this period rose from $30,000 and 3,000 a year to $70,000 and $12,000 a year pretty much guaranteeing no younger members would ever join a club located in rural, Northern Florida.
4. Tiger mania begins to wane and then goes into free fall along with his marriage, his clean-cut image, and his game. Ricky, Rory, Jordan and others have a buzz, but not a mania, one day it will happen again but who knows when?
5. Then you have the massive increase in other options for younger people extreme sports, cycling, MAA and of course surfing the internet and playing video games!
Every form of entertainment is competition for golf therefore golf clubs MUST be entertaining at every level possible, few clubs really embrace this truth. (See the “One Strategy” chapter in the Golf Marketing Bible.)
6. Then you have the advent of third-party tee time booking companies both a blessing and a curse. They make it easy for people to book but cut into already diminished margins for daily fee courses. Strategic use of these distribution platforms can be very valuable, even profitable, but since no golf club can actually articulate their marketing strategy, they are usually misused instead.
View the full article and more reasons cited by Andrew Wood HERE
