The benefits to golf clubs from brand partnerships

Brand partnerships between golf clubs and other organisations are low-cost initiatives that can enhance the golf club’s brand entirely by association alone, while delivering real financial results at the same time, writes Stephen Nicholson.

Brand partnerships in corporate speak, friendships in social circles and ‘it’s not what you know, but who you know’ in conversational patter falling somewhere between the two.

Basically, a relationship with another business / person that has reciprocal benefits. It could be as simple or as little as they recommend your business / service to their guests and vice-versa or you could both collaborate together to host a large week-long event netting £50,000 in revenue!

Thankfully for me, I’ve managed to facilitate both types of relationship with businesses to help increase sales at golf clubs I have been involved with and I’m going to tell you how I was able to do this so you too can benefit from engaging with like-minded ‘brands’.

Firstly, be open to possibilities. I heard a story from a club not long ago that they had an approach from a large multi-chain hotel brand looking to join forces to offer golf breaks utilising their course for the golf, with the hotel providing the accommodation, dinner, breakfast and transfers between the hotel and the course. Sounds like an opportunity worth exploring, doesn’t it? All the club had to do was find out when they would be looking to need the golf course, what rate they would pay for every round of golf hosted, what kind of marketing channels would the hotel be looking to target with the packages being offered and could they upsell anything to these visitors, such as lunch while they’re at the club and so on.

For a multitude of reasons, the club never responded to the hotel company.

Don’t be this club!

Credit: Tristan Jones

If ever a company / person wants to look at the possibility of working together for shared business improvement and financial gain, always take the time to at least meet, ask questions and share your thoughts / concerns. As with like any relationship I’m sure you will be able to reach a compromise that suits both parties.

Just like that, your brand partnership journey has begun.

The second step to stardom across the brand partnership stratosphere is to be proactive. Be prepared to go out and ask companies / people to team up. I’ve found that by making the initial contact it usually comes as a surprise to people, whoever they may be, but once you explain the theory behind it, more often than not it comes as a nice surprise and one that they are happy to explore further due to the potential of mutual gain. I’ve contacted and formed these relationships with florists, car servicing and main dealerships, local hotels and even golf clubs that are located a little further afield.

Leaning on the golf club partnership angle, I managed to agree a deal with another golf club whereby my members were able to use a top 100 ranked golf course in England completely free! We gave the same privilege to their members and based playability simply on the subject of availability, with requests taken through the office to ensure only members benefitted from the offer. On days when our course would be closed for an open / pro-am and so on these agreements are great to ensure that members still have opportunity to play and, as you can imagine, having the opportunity to play a top 100 club as part of your membership is a big coup for many golfers. These relationships therefore don’t just have an impact on revenue generation, but retention of current revenue as well!

Finally – to put a little more strategy behind this piece: If your club doesn’t already have a strategy it should get one and part of the process should be to confirm ‘who they are’. An easy way to describe this is to ask, ‘If you were a car brand, which one would best represent you?’

For somewhere like a Wentworth, the answer would probably be a Rolls-Royce, for another club the answer might be more like a Skoda, with ambitions to upgrade to a BMW – you get the idea!

From here you get a good idea of perspective and where your club sits in the marketplace and therefore which brands, businesses and people might be relevant to join forces. Here are a few examples of the relationships I forged whilst at my previous club.

At Oxford Golf Club I targeted a relationship with the local ice hockey team, Oxford City Stars, as they had dramatically improved their branding and increased their exposure and following through social media. As a result they were getting thousands of people attending their matches. We managed to forge a partnership where our members got half price match tickets, their players got to play our course for half price and we both got an advert at each other’s facility for free.

As a result of this relationship a little while down the line an opportunity became available to enter into a relationship with Oxford Pride. We put up rainbow-coloured flags on our golf course (which cost around £200). In return we were marketed via every other partner within Oxford Pride that year: including the council, the university the football club. The press release alone was seen by over 50,000 people!

Finally, we managed to establish a relationship with a local national chain of hotels and had some success in bringing external golf breaks bookings into the area.

We also had a deal with the spa / leisure part of their business to offer our members discounted membership, so the deal was far-reaching. So, when I went to them with a proposal about one of my clients taking up around 80 room nights in the hotel for the majority of the week for a large golf event, they were more than happy to listen and eventually we managed to secure the booking. A booking that also saw over 300 rounds of golf and a net green fee revenue of around £7,000 for the club.

As you can see from the above very real examples, brand partnerships have the capacity to generate revenue. They are great, low-cost initiatives that help to add value to a club’s offering and can help to enhance and reinforce a club’s brand entirely by association alone.

Starting out, plucking up the courage to ask potential businesses / people to partner can be a little daunting. But remember the worst that can happen is the business / person in question politely declines, you go your separate ways and life goes on. I would remind myself that their decision is their loss and I would make it my mission to then try and partner with a similar business that could benefit from the proposed partnership. Also in my experience from sales, every ‘no’ brings you closer to a ‘yes’! That thought process would spur me on to contact the next potential candidate, and the next, and the next, and the next!

So, go on. Give it a go, ask the question and see where it takes you. If you don’t ask, you don’t get!

Stephen Nicholson is business manager of Haydock Park Golf Club.

For more information on Haydock Park Golf Club, visit www.haydockparkgc.co.uk