Market Positioning

Knowing where you are relative to your market's willingness or ability to afford your specific categories of membership and fees is crucial to your success. Market positioning reports combine the elements of the One Day Site Evaluation with a thorough demographic evaluation of your marketplace. Just as in the process we employ for a one day evaluation we will initiate a conference call with you and a panel of your choosing, to discuss your needs and to create a general strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis (SWOT Analysis) relative to your membership position.

We will also provide an Excel worksheet for your staff to record the trending for the past five years in your revenue centers, including membership adds and losses, golf rounds and a variety of important information that can provide a broad overview of where your club has been and how it has been trending. Trending can often reveal core issues that may have relevance to your membership issues.

We will also ask that you also provide us with a competitive overview for all competitive facilities within at least a fifteen minute radius from the Club. This will allow us to visualize, at least from a price perspective, your position in the local marketplace and to reflect this in our onsite discussions.

Different from the one day site evaluation is the demographic evaluation of your marketplace. Using a zip code analysis to determine where your existing members reside, we will ascertain your current market radius (which is rarely over 15 minutes drive time) and create an age by income demographic report.

Using regional cost of living indicators and your current fee levels we will ascertain the level of annual income required to become a member of the Club. This will allow us to extrapolate from the demographic report the “universe” of potential members from an affordability standpoint. Next we will determine the penetration of golfers in your region as provided by an annual survey conducted by the National Golf Foundation. This will then provide us with the number of households that can afford membership with an interest in golf. We will then overlay the competition and determine how many households within the marketplace may already be members of yours or a competitor club. The result will be the number of potentially available households that might be prospective members.

On Site Meeting – At the meeting we will review the trending information, competitive positioning and demographic analysis as well as any core issues that may have surfaced in the process of our study, including the SWOT analysis and the potential impact of these findings in your membership recruitment and retention program. On the basis of our initial discussions, demographic analysis and our historical analysis we will provide an overview of the market and a set of short and long range recommendations which may have some or all of the following characteristics.

Extent of the market capable of affording membership
Number of potential golfers in the market area
Categories of membership and their compatibility to the market area.
Pricing, equity, payment plans and other opportunities.
Communications of the plan, creating a sense of excitement and urgency with the members. Review of graphics and collateral’s program.
Potential incentives to existing and referred members.
Identification of potential target markets.
Creating a perpetuating process for referrals.
Creating non-member traffic generating events.

The data provided and the recommendations CMC provide will focus on maximizing your market position and focusing on best practices to generate prospective member traffic to the Club. Essentially, we will leave you with the necessary tools to create your marketing initiative.