Understanding the Core Golfer
September 29, 2016
By Kermit Franklin
You often hear that there are 30 million golfers in the United States. Some say 25 million. The National Golf Foundation and consultants retained by the PGA of America say that the number is closer to 90 million if you include all who aspire to play the game.
But the number that matters most to the golf industry is the one represented by the number of “core” golfers there are in the United States – the men and women who average 37 rounds per year, take lessons from PGA Professionals, purchase equipment on a regular basis, take golf vacations and belong to clubs that are members of a state/regional golf association. According to the annual reports compiled by the National Golf Foundation (NGF) since 2001, they account for 87 cents of every dollar expended on the game and record 91% of all the rounds played. The short term importance of these folks is obvious. They’re the game’s best and most reliable customers. The long term importance is just as obvious. Unless the game keeps replenishing its ranks, it is going to run aground at some point, potentially in the not too distant future.
It’s probably no accident that the NGF (and others) began keeping close statistical tabs on these “core” players right about the time the game’s 60-year run of uninterrupted growth began to wane in 2004. Austerity has a way of focusing the mind. And what the industry has begun to focus its mind upon is just who these “core” golfers are. You can’t develop strategies for a market you don’t understand and you can’t grow a market you can’t quantify.
So, who are they – other than persons we know that in the aggregate play all those rounds, spend all that money, and join all those clubs?
For starters, they are the folks who join clubs – not just country clubs, but municipally based clubs, corporate clubs and other clubs without specific real estate. In all of those annual reports they put out the NGF often comments that the most reliable indicator of a core golfer is membership in a club that is affiliated with a state/regional golf association.
But that’s only part of the story, for while virtually all members of such clubs are core golfers, not all core golfers are members of clubs. If only life were that easy for the owners, managers and marketers of the game.
Their ranks are roughly 12.7 million – 10.2 million of them men and 2.5 million of them women. They play virtually the same number of rounds per year – 36.0 for women and 37.7 for men. They watch the same amount of golf on television, and both men and women take golf vacations at the same three-year frequency (50%). They take lessons from a PGA Professional at the same 25% rate with 82% of those lessons private instruction. Women golfers are, on average older than the men – 49.1 years of age for women and 44.2 years for men; women take up the game at a much later average age – 31.9 versus 22.1. Their average household incomes are virtually identical -- $98,329.00 for men and $97,333.00 for women. And even though men express greater interest in the game, women maintain USGA Handicap Indexes at higher percentages than men – 43% versus 35%.
From the average ages of women and men golfers one might assume that this is an audience unsophisticated in the arts of modern electronic communication and thus not amenable to the marketing strategies so prevalent in other industries. That would be a mistake. Maybe it’s those average household incomes that are more important when it comes to figuring out who among us uses the latest and greatest in social media modes; maybe it’s just that those who play a lot of golf are reverse tech precocious – that is, uncommonly young at heart when it comes to adapting to the latest and greatest in communication technology.
Whatever the reason, core golfers simply have to be marketed in many of the same ways that industries approach Millennials. The below pie chart indicates the way core golfers typically communicate, and it hews closer to the way we think about Millennials communicating than most would have guessed. Cell phones appear to be the largest way golfers communicate, followed by emails. If the game seeks to increase participation, the chart below is a good starting point.
How Core golfers typically communicate.
Retrieved from NGF, 2012.
What’s the point then? That only “core” golfers matter to the industry? Hardly; it’s that the industry is always working along three tracks – a short term one that seeks to appeal directly to this core audience, a mid-term one that seeks to turn casual and recreational golfers into core golfers who then join all those clubs, take all those vacations, buy all that equipment, and play all those rounds, and a long-term one that seeks to introduce the game primarily through junior programs but increasingly through adult recruitment initiatives as well.
Even the most casual observer of the industry will recognize that the industry has invested enormous effort in the long-term strategy; there have never been so many junior and developmental programs as there are today. And that same observer may find investment in the core audience a given. It’s the mid-term strategy, the one that seeks to turn the more casual player into an avid player that would seem lacking – something for the industry to ponder as it works to reverse some of its recent fortunes.
Kermit Franklin is interning with the SCGA Governmental Affairs Department while working towards a Master of Arts Degree at USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy.