Emotional Marketing Tees Off

Now, don’t go all emotional on me.
 
Or maybe you should. Golf, as we know, is an emotional game. Anyone who has gone bogey-bogey-birdie to push a match into extra holes understands this. Even the little bit of redness in a drive on the hole after a three-putt green qualifies. And most of us have memories, those most emotional things, of excellent golf days with fathers, mothers, uncles, friends, etc.
 

So it makes sense that advertisers and marketers would want to appeal to our emotional side.
 
“Golfers have incredibly strong emotional connections to the game,” says Tom Meyers, chief strategy officer for DRIVE Marketing, an Atlanta-area firm that is trying to use emotion to make golf marketing more effective.
 
“These connections influence every purchase decision they make, from what kind of clubs they buy to where they play,” Meyers says. “Most golf courses are missing this emotional connection in their marketing. They’re wasting a lot of advertising dollars.”
 
Meyers has a point. Open the sports section of the newspaper in most cities, page to the back, and you’ll find a handful of three-inch ads, each touting a track with well-used nuggets such as “championship course,” “challenging greens” and “available for your next golf event.”
 
“Sixty-seven hundred yards and bent greens are nice, but it doesn’t really resonate with people,” says Dave Nies, Meyers’ colleague at DRIVE. “Most every golf course has a photo that looks nice that they can put in an ad. But so many of them look and feel the same. We can help them stand out.”
 
DRIVE is driving a new nail with an old hammer: direct mail. By targeting golfers within a 30-mile radius of a course (surveys show that most people will drive no farther than that to play) with an effective direct mail piece, DRIVE hopes to help courses do a better job of filling tee sheets. And to be fair, that new nail has an even sharper point: personalization. Modern printing technology allows each recipient’s name to be featured in an arresting way within the direct mail presentation. For instance: the recipient’s name appears on a tournament leaderboard, strokes ahead of challengers, or on the bib of a tour caddie.