It's common knowledge that five brands — Callaway, TaylorMade, Ping, Titlest and Cobra — control 90% of the driver market. Same basic situation with wedges, irons and putters.
The Big Five's domination leaves little room at the table for challenger brands. So companies like Wilson, Mizuno, Tour Edge and PXG are all fighting for a small sliver of the last 10% of market share.
Some are doing quite well in that arena. And there are new, D-to-C competitors popping up all the time.
Challenger brands in any category require a different approach to marketing than the market leaders.
They need different thinking, different goals, a different strategy, different tactical mix and different execution than the big boys.
So the first thing to do if you're a challenger brand is to shed the baggage that people bring with them from all their years of experience in the golf industry.
Toss the rear-view mirror and look outside the industry for inspiration. Get past all those pre-conceived notions of the product, the golfing consumer, and the category.
Look what Avis did in the car rental business. "We're #2, We Try Harder" worked brilliantly. Not by beating the market leader Hertz, but by beating all the other challenger brands.
(Technically, Avis wasn't actually #2 when they started that campaign, but they sure were after.)
Forget about beating the Big 5 brands. That'll never happen. You're just pounding your head against the wall if you keep going toe to toe with the Big 5, trying to match them feature for feature.
Instead, focus on devising creative new ways to beat out all the other second-tier challenger brands.
If you're a challenger brand act like the challenger! Acting like the big boys won't get you any closer to them and it won't help you beat out the other challengers.
If you're trying to appeal to the anti-brand market segment, then you better act like a contrarian brand, look like one, and sound like one.
If you're trying to be the value brand, then get your messaging aligned with that. Don't be wishy-washy about it.
Wilson embraced the challenger brand persona with their ground-breaking foray into reality TV. Driver vs Driver would never have been done by one of the Big 5 brands.
Mizuno also filled that role, for a little while. They recognized the emotional connection that players had with their finely forged Mizuno irons, and they leveraged that with some advertising that had the distinctive tone of a challenger brand.
But I don't see any other good examples. Seems like all the other challenger brands are just emulating the big boys and hoping for the best.
All the marketing is product oriented and all the messaging is basically the same, "more distance" "more technology" hyperbole.
But successful challengers don't do feature-focused advertising. They don't compare themselves directly to the big boys.
In "Eating The Big Fish" Adam Morgan spells it out quite nicely...
"The #1 job of marketing for challenger brands is to tell us where they stand. Not in relation to the big boys, but in relation to something altogether different."
I would add.... They don't just tell us, they show us. They dramatize where they stand, and what their brand stands for.
They forego the rational pitch and establish an an emotional appeal that goes much deeper. They intrude on the golfer's consciousness and paint a very clear picture of who they are and why they're different.
"Challenger brands have to have to possess a stronger, emotionally-based relationship with the consumer than tha brand leader does," Morgan said. "
So if you're building golf clubs you need something besides the player endorsement approach. You'll never beat TaylorMade in that arena.
You can't claim to be the most technologically advanced, or the most forgiving, or the most popular.
You gotta find something else to hang your hat on.
We can help you with that. At Birdie Ops, that what we do. We provide the thinking, the strategy, and the design execution that differentiates you from the crowd.
So if you're wondering how to compete with the big 5 in golf, let's talk. Call 541-815-0075.
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