The Pellucid Perspective - January 2024 - 8

INDUSTRY PERFORMANCE
MEASUREMENT
Stellar marketing isn't simply making sales go up more
than the advertising expenditure, it's understanding
what drives that result so you can modify and
manipulate it year-to-year to create repetitive success.
that the fact we've welcomed a slew of new golfers
due to COVID and the average round duration didn't
balloon was a feat but...golf is still 4-5 hour activity
(which participants will either describe as a slog or
as time with good friends, outdoors, surrounded by
Nature). Cross this off the potential stimulus list...
* Too expensive - As I referenced above, we have several
ways (annual Internet Golf Course Database Weekend
Greens Fee fact, GMRC submissions) to document
that the price of golf has done nothing but rise both
pre-and post-pandemic. Our regular readers will also
know that I've outlined and graphed the fact that golf
operators have actually trailed inflation since COVID
so, while we've showed more restraint than retailers
and other service providers, golf isn't any cheaper or
more affordable than previously facilitating golfers
to " play more for less " (despite that being someone's
tagline in the industry I believe). Cross this one off the
accelerators list as well...
* Too difficult, lack of proficiency to produce enjoyment
- Despite the numerous equipment revelations
and iterations, the relatively ubiquitous presence of
instruction and options (in person, group, online, apps
etc.), I haven't seen anything that has gained wide
adoption, scaled as a business model or significantly
impacted the average score of golfers (closest to the
pin might be GolfTec which appears to have produced
individual golfer success and expanded locations and
format types but still not enough to move the " average
score " needle nationally). Strike it from the list of
growth drivers as well...
* For the sake of brevity, let's just tick off Jim's K's:
We're no more welcoming to women than we were
pre-pandemic, among young folks we've made some
noticeable progress against the cool factor both in
just perception after they tried it (pandemic-induced)
as well as the fact that we're increasingly allowing
on-course music and providing digital connections
for their non-golf multi-tasking and always-on social
interactions. As far as building relationships, nope, the
prevalent practice continues to be " when they show up,
we show 'em a good time and hope they come back. "
I want to spend another couple of sentences on the last one
because I believe it's where we have the greatest opportunity to
control our destiny in the near-term. In fairness to owner/operators,
part of the reason we suck at Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) is our technology and largely " trailingedge "
efforts by the majority of our service providers in this area.
8 The Pellucid PersPecTive
Tying customers to transactions in the PoS system (not the tee
sheet, we want to know what and how much they bought, each
visit) was around in the era of FORE! Reservations and yet, 15
years on, it's still not standard practice. Without that fundamental
building block, it's really hard to build any serious CRM
" muscle " . Linking specific target groups to marketing activation
(i.e. your broadcast email system) has also been lacking so, even if
you could identify defectors, new golfers, highest spenders, golfonly
patrons etc. there's no way to export that list of emails to a
system tied to a catalogue of messages, press the button and push
out the relevant message to the relevant audience. Our clients
tell us they're willing to invest the time and skill into doing those
CRM activities if it takes minutes, not hours. Currently having
to connect all those systems takes hours, every time and until we
harness technology to do our will vs. us bending to the limitations
of a disjoint " tech stack " , we will remain stuck where we
are in marketing and creating demand vs. reacting to it. Those
things are starting to change, in part due to the continued capability
and adoption of cloud computing, APIs between programs
and common sets of simple metrics that are near-universal vs.
varying by each individual course. We're waist-deep involved in
that effort with technology partner Metolius, a handful of PoS
providers and our GMRC participants who have been waiting
for the technology to serve them and " make it easy. " We've now
successfully loaded and produced an automated data transfer,
daily-updated, weather-integrated, comparative period, multidimensional
tracker and scorecard for 2 PoS systems and 4 beta
courses which we'll be demonstrating at the end of the SoI in
Orlando on Thursday 25 January, from 1:30-3PM EST in Room
312A in the Orange County Convention Center. The full presentation
will also be livestreamed so you can watch/listen in
that way as well. If you're receiving this magazine, you should
have gotten an email invite last week with details on how to register
(if not, email jim@pellucidcorp.com and I'll send it to you);
I think it'll be worth 90 minutes of your time.
In closing, it's fine to bask in the glory of a record-breaking
year for a little while longer, no matter whether you're in an offseason
or peak season geography. I can tell you it's sure a heck
of a lot more fun being the bearer of good news than the first
18 years of Pellucid's existence and being mis-labeled by the
industry poohbahs as " the industry pessimists. " Good news is
here, we said it first and loudest and backed it up, as always, with
quantitative facts and logical reasoning on that data. However,
if we don't figure out what's driving current growth, how we can
harness it and build those customer relationships and dialogues
to shape our future, then at some point in the near future things
will inevitably turn and we'll be back at reporting those disappointing
numbers and saying, " Remember those recent, good
'ol days? "
n
January 2024
The Pellucid Perspective - January 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Pellucid Perspective - January 2024
