Positioning Precedes Marketing
by Nick Carter
Before developing a marketing and communications plan, you would be well-served to do three basic things: First, thoroughly review your competition. Do you have new competitors or any in the planning stages near you?
Second, field a written survey of your members/facility users to find out how well you are meeting their expectations. Then, follow-up the survey with
several focus groups comprised of your members or customers.
You need to understand the following issues so your club can be positioned before developing a productive marketing and communications plan:
Who uses your club and why?
What do they enjoy most and least about your club and your competitors?
How much value do they think they receive for the price they pay?
What opportunities exist to increase the perceived value of your club with your members?
One of the single biggest mistakes made by managers, developers, or owners of new and existing clubs is assuming that they know their markets, their competition, their existing members and their prospective members and customers, and hence their facility's positioning -- without having done
any diligent research to confirm or repudiate their assumptions. Fewer than ten percent of all existing clubs do any market or consumer research, or have a written positioning statement that includes consumer, market, and competitive demographic profiles.
The position of a private golf facility, for example, should determine virtually everything about that facility -- its pricing, the clubhouse and course design, the services and amenities provided, the kinds of memberships sold, and even how the memberships are sold. Furthermore, an existing facility's positioning should drive any remodeling, upgrading, new services, price increases, new menus, the level of service provided, and how it can be promoted and marketed most effectively.
You can rest assured that your facility will be positioned by the marketplace -- by members, customers, competitors and vendors. And whether or not it is written down, you, as the manager or owner, probably have the facility positioned in your mind, too. Problems arise, however, when the positioning by your market and your members does not agree with your positioning. The fundamental Law of Positioning says that: 'Positioning starts with what is in the mind of your customer, not what is in your mind." Thus, positioning is thinking in reverse about literally everything you offer your members and customers, from the design of a golf course to the types of foods offered -- even the kinds of services offered.
The importance of doing the work and research necessary to accurately understand your market and your customers, then to translate this knowledge into a customer-oriented positioning statement, cannot be over-emphasized. A private club should consider repositioning itself every year, based on an increasingly dynamic market, changing consumer needs, and new, more aggressive competition. A club risks its very existence if it does not spend the time and money to understand clearly what the needs of the market are -- and how it can position itself to satisfy those needs.
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