Readdressing the ball

Perhaps more than any other consumer group, golfers are susceptible to manipulation. As players (some might say victims) of a game where so many things can - and frequently do - go wrong, they are forever searching for the ball, club or swing-perfecting gizmo that will inspire confidence in their abilities and silence the little voice that starts chattering the moment they address the ball. You actually think you can hit this shot? After that last one? What happened? You must not be cocking your wrist at the right time . . .

For some golfers the answer is a favorite brand of golf ball or a $500 titanium driver with a grapefruit-sized head. No matter what it is, if it keeps your Inner Golf Devil quiet, it's your most prized piece of equipment. Trouble is, in most cases, the little voice stays quiet only temporarily. And then you have to find another talisman.

Therein lies the foundation for the multimillion-dollar golf industry.

In 1995, to increase the likelihood that its golf balls would capture the interest of golfers looking for a boost to their game, Greenville, S.C.-based Maxfli Golf began a wide ranging project to redesign its logos, packaging and advertising. The company brought in Wallace Church Associates, New York, to handle the design duties and BBDO South, Atlanta, to develop new TV and print ads.

"Maxfli's market share was stagnant," says Debra Mager, senior vice president, account director, BBDO South. "They just couldn't seem to distinguish themselves. The golf industry is really very homogeneous in a lot of ways. There may be a few who stand out but when you look at the advertising and packaging it's all fairly similar. So our effort was to create our own niche."

Guiding these efforts were a number of research studies, including segmentation work and a variety of qualitative and quantitative approaches. "We needed to develop a market-driven identity for Maxfli based on consumer wants and needs," says Cheryl Swanson, senior vice president, strategic planning at Wallace Church Associates.

Several layers

The research process started with focus groups to uncover what motivates golf ball purchases. "We wanted to find out how people talk about golf balls," says Terry Rooke, executive vice president, director of research, BBDO South. "Do they identify a ball by its company, by the brand that's on the ball or by some numeric designation?"

BBDO found that there are several layers to awareness in the golf ball category. There's the ball manufacturer, the ball brand name, and then some kind of number or letter identifier ("the GoFar X1, made by Behemoth Industries"). "As a result, we had to take a very close look at how awareness was being driven. Was it being driven by the company manufacturing the product, the brand it was being marketed under or by the ball type? The research helped us understand the inner workings of that and identify the audience," Rooke says.

"We found was that every ball needs an identifier, something that allows one golfer to tell another, 'Well, I play the HT90,' and make it appear that they know a lot about the game, even if that isn't the case. That signaled to us that we needed to not only to get the Maxfli brand into people's minds but also to give them this nomenclature hook that allows them to be inside the game," Rooke says.

Research showed a great deal of confusion over the Maxfli ball line, and golf balls in general, Mager says. "Consumers said that they couldn't understand differences between the balls, the attributes, what they were designed to do. They recognized the balls by the color of the box. They didn't know the nomenclature. They'd say, 'I play the green box versus or the yellow box.' There was a need to better organize the hierarchy of the balls and make their benefits easier to understand and also to distinguish our packaging and our brand from everybody else's."

National panel

After the focus groups, BBDO used a Market Facts national panel as a cost-effective way to generate a representative sample of golfers to contact by telephone. "The golf category is a low incidence one," Rooke says. "Total golfers only represent about 10 percent of the population and heavy golfers are a small subset of that so it's not something that you typically would survey for randomly because the costs would be prohibitive.

"The sample was broken down by where they buy balls, where they play golf, etc. So out of the sample we had a great variety of subsets, which is critical because in golf if you represent subset A but don't represent subset B, you're deluding yourself. The guy who belongs to the country club is very different from the guy who plays at the local public course. Their attitudes are different even if they play the same level of game," Rooke says.

The research showed that while many golfers are quality oriented, there is an even bigger segment that could be called the fashion crowd of golf. "They want to play the right brand and the right ball because it's stylish to do so, not because they're committed to the game of golf. These are often the country club or corporate golfers, the wannabes who want to play with excellent golfers, none of whom might be committed to becoming a par golfer but who want to use the products that par golfers use. Armed with that information we wanted to find out whether the Maxfli brand was meeting the needs of any of the segments we had identified," Rooke says.

"Segmentation studies don't tell you how many segments there are, they tell you a variety of ways that you could segment the business. You select the segmentation approach that seems to make the most sense for your category. In our case it was a four-segment solution," Rooke says.

Brand imagery

BBDO also conducted a Brand Fitness Study on Maxfli, a proprietary approach that seeks to identify the type of person associated with a brand (user imagery), the product-based imagery (what does the product do for you?) and the personal drives imagery (the underlying motivating factors). "We map the three dimensions of imagery for our brands as well as all competing brands and by using correspondence mapping we're able to find both important and unique space as well as where brands overlap with competitors," Rooke says.

Meanwhile, on the design front, the people at Wallace Church Associates were busy developing options for a new look for Maxfli packaging and products. Swanson used the company's proprietary Visual Exploratory Process to identify symbolism that would capture the essence of the new Maxfli brand positioning. This process, in conjunction with BBDO research, came up with key words to communicate Maxfli's new position, such as "energy and momentum," "vitality" and "enthusiasm."
"After the segmentation and image work, we went back and explored how we might talk about this brand called Maxfli. We tested multiple positionings so we could get a better handle on how each of them would be responded to. We took that information and used it to refine the positioning," Rooke says.

After design options were created, triads and diads were conducted with respondents who said they were heavy golfers. "We showed packaging and ball design alternatives including logos, and took them through a sequence of how the logo looked on ball sleeves, on the balls themselves, etc. We weren't comparing version A with version B but rather we wanted to see how different ones hit different people, what kinds of words they used to play back their impressions," Rooke says.

Color-coded

Based on the research findings and the insights of Wallace Church and BBDO, the new positioning for Maxfli projected a youthful attitude, but one that treated the game of golf with respect. "We went with the design that best signaled the positioning we had chosen, that Maxfli stood for winning and a youthful approach, not in terms of years but in a way of living life," Rooke says.

As part of the redesign, the Maxfli line was reorganized into good, better and best levels, with packaging color-coded white, black and gold, respectively. "The new packaging ensured that each product offering fit neatly into the overall brand architecture, yet was distinguished by its own proprietary color," Swanson says.

"Average to good golfers really don't understand all the technical gobbledygook that manufacturers keep telling them. They really just want to know the basic benefits so they can choose. We tried to make the packaging and advertising very compelling," Mager says.

"We were trying to appeal to a more contemporary, aggressive golfer, one who would take more risks, who knew what they wanted and would be more assertive in their approach. A lot of golfers buy on image. Whatever they feel good about they pick. It's almost like apparel or cosmetics. The ball you choose says a lot about you."