Never underestimate the lingering power of brand identity design. Especially a bad one.
Decades after you've completed that all-important yet usually undervalued project, your brand identity will either be a tremendous asset to your golf business, or an anchor that drags you down like a balky putter on your best ball striking day.
It's like the good, the bad and and ugly.
It's not just about looking good. It's about selling more, building goodwill, and gaining long-term brand loyalty. If your logo looks like crap on a hat, that's going to be hard.
For big-name golf courses branded merchandise. is a nice secondary revenue stream. If you're Pebble Beach, Augusta National, or Bandon Dunes, it doesn't matter what your logo looks like. You're going to sell a lot of branded hats, shirts and golf towels simply for the souvenir value.
But if you're one of 120 courses in Palm Springs or Myrtle Beach fighting for every last penny of revenues, you better have a brand identity that looks nice, differentiates you from the pack and moves product off the shelves.
That's where Design, with a Capital D, can provide a tremendous competitive advantage
Or not.
When your members or loyal customers go elsewhere to play golf you want them wearing YOUR merchandise. You want them to be willing brand ambassadors. Brand identity design, when done well, turns customers into walking billboards.
On the other hand, the lingering effect of an ugly logo is ugly sales figures.
Unfortunately, an ugly brown blob for a logo is not what anyone wants on a shirt, hat, or even on a golf ball. Doesn't matter what fancy brand of shirt you put it on, it still looks like a little dollup of dog doo.
Of course, "ugly" is subjective.
Here's something that's absolutely not subjective : Every golf course has trees, so a tree logo is not going to differentiate your course from all the rest. In fact, it puts you squarely in a crowd of mediocrity.
Trees are a dime a dozen in golf course logos. (Second only to two crossed golf clubs which is the biggest visual cliche in the golf industry. ) It's difficult to execute the idea of a tree in a simple, pleasing graphic style. And the more literal you get with your logo, the worse it is.
I find it particularly puzzling with golf course operators choose a tree logo to go with a course name like this one. What does a big ugle tree shape have to do with slippery rocks?
The species of tree does not make a good concept for any brand identity design in the golf industry. Even the most interesting looking juniper tree does not make a good-looking logo. And a dead one???
Before you choose a logo design for your golf course, make sure you do your homework. Look at every competitor in the country, not just those in your local market. That tree idea has probably already been taken. It will NOT differentiate your golf course from the pack.
This moss-covered oak tree appears to be bleeding. Or is it a Rorschach ink blot test? I'm not sure. Every year that this logo remains on the shelves means the course is leaving money on the table.
Brand identity design in the golf industry goes beyond the logo. It's words too. Ideas. And a story.
A long time ago when I first moved to Bend, Oregon I was tasked to do some advertising for a local golf course with the unfortunate name, "Pine Meadows."
I said no way.
"We're not spending a dime of their money on advertising until we convince them to change the name. It sounds like a cemetery or a trailer park. Besides, there are a 27 golf courses across the country called Pine Meadows. There's no way they could trademark that."
Thankfully, the new, Japanese owners were open-minded. Even though they didn't fully grasp how bad Pine Meadows really was, they approved an additional budget for naming.
So we dug in. We researched the history, geography and geology of the area. The course overlooks the Deschutes river, so that was a source of inspiration. We looked into the local flora and fauna, and even tribal legends from the earliest inhabitants.
The name I came up with is, to this day, one of the most memorable golf course brand names in the country: Widgi Creek. Three syllables. Starts with a whisper and ends in a hard K sound.
No, there's no creek by that name.
However, there are plenty of elk meandering through the golf course. Plus we found inspiration in petroglyphs. Thus, the idea for the brand identity design.
This name and identity has a great story built into it. Everyone wants to know where it came from and what it means. In other words, it's engaging! It triggers curiosity.
No one ever asked, "what's the story with Pine Meadows?" Snoozer names = snoozer sales.
Once the name and logo were complete we were ready to launch print, radio and television advertising . The results... Our work propelled the course to #1 in the market the first summer.
Widgi Creek is not the best golf course in Central Oregon... The layout is tricky and frighteningly tight. The green complexes are no fun. But that doesn't matter. Golfers are quick to forget how poorly they putted or how many trees they hit.
But no one forgets the name Widgi Creek.
Obviously, it takes a lot to keep a golf course running profitably year after year, and merchandise sales are just a tiny part of the picture. You can't put lipstick on a pig, so if the condition of the course is horrendous, no amount of design work is going to help.
Malibu Golf Club has plenty of trees on it. We chose an iconic image that immediately says "Malibu."
An engaging brand identity makes everything a little bit easier. Here's what you can expect from a well-conceived, well-executed brand identity design in the golf industry:
• Higher margins and faster turns on all branded merchandise in the proshop.
• Tee sheets booked solid, even in the shoulder seasons. A healthy mix of tourist rounds and local's rounds.
• Higher-end clientele, which translates to more revenue per round.
• Higher percieved value of every round played.
• Better Google reviews and local word-of-mouth.
• A healthy mix of young and old, women and men. Millennials are more design savvy than 70-year-olds.
• Better top-of-mind brand awareness even in crowded golf markets. Almost every year Widgi Creek gets voted "Best Golf Course" by a local paper.
If your branded merchandise has been moving slower and slower, give us a call. It's probably a design problem.
If your brand identity dates back to the Ben Hogan era, it's probably time to think about a rebranding project. The new generation of golfers has a different, more discerning idea of brand identity design in the golf industry.
Times are changing. There's music and hoodies and mobile apps all over the golf course. Do you want to look like your grandpa's niblick? You'll never know how much you've been losing until you get your brand identity aligned with the modern golf market.
Sunriver Resort near Bend, Oregon is an iconic destination for Oregon, Washington and California golfers. They recently re-branded in an attempt to update the look and feel of all their merch. Guess what they went with?
Trees, of course. As if they're a novelty in the Pacific Northwest.
No one around here is impressed by trees. And if we were, we'd know that Sunriver's trees are scrubby little lodgepole pines. Nothing like the giants that line the courses at competing resorts like Black Butte Ranch, Salishan or Suncadia.
So Sunriver's new identity is not only forgettable, it's misleading and factually incorrect.
And here's another unfortunate element of that rebranding effort: It's the final straw in a long, drawn out effort to abandon a truly distinctive logo mark that had heritage.
And no trees whatsoever.
There's even a golf club manufacturing company that recently rebranded itself with a big ugly tree for a logo, paired perfectly with an unreadable font. I'm not sure that's the client's fault. That's just malpractice on the part of the designer.
As creative professionals in the corporate world it's our responsibility to make sure that nothing gets produced that's "off brand" for our clients. Sometimes that means pushing back hard against ideas that clients bring to the table.
And those usually involve trees.
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