The Pellucid Perspective - May 2023 - 8

GOLF CONSUMER
BASE
the way the math works out. The good news is that, by Pellucid
calculations, we attracted over 4M new/lapsed golfers to play
1+ times in '22. The bad news is that means with a net gain of
just under 1M golfers, we managed to let 3M+ players in '21 slip
through our fingers for '22 play (remember that we define golfers
as 1+ rds/yr so it's not because we set the participation bar
too high, ha, ha). At the '22 State of the Industry presentation,
preacher Stuart was in the pulpit outlining how this outcome,
enabled by our continuing lack of customer contact collection
rigor and failure to use that data when collected to increase our
retention rate at individual facility-level, was nothing short of a
" sin " . We can do better in '23 and our joint work with Metolius
combining our analysis methodology, measures and views with
their technology platform and activation tools should give some
number of our joint client facilities a leg up in fixing this during
the current season.
Returning to the good news of the larger golfer base and
how its play metrics (Participation vs. Frequency Rates), shape
(demographics) and involvement levels (Committeds vs. Casuals)
changed vs. '21, here are the highlights:
* Play Metrics - The cardinal metric of Play Rate
(rounds per capita per year which synthesizes the
population, golfers and frequency measures) increased
as the golfer base rose more than population gain and
offsetting a frequency decline
* Demographics - Males were the vast majority of
the gain by gender, the 25-54 age range dominated
the gains (encouraging news that we may be making
some strides in connecting with the " lost generation "
of Millennials and their immediate successors) and
the highest income group ($100K+) contributed all of
the golfer gain
*
Involvement - Our involvement suffered slightly
as the most engaged golfers (10+ rds/yr) comprised
51.0% of total golfers vs. last year's contribution of
8 The Pellucid PersPecTive
51.5%. It seems slight but the much higher average
frequency of this group vs. the 1-9 rds/year golfers
and the fact that higher engagement golfers are more
insulated from defection, mean that fractions of
points matter on this dimension
One other positive aspect of the NSGA '22 survey is the
recent addition of a question regarding intent to play the following
season. For the second year (the question was first
added in the '21 survey as we sought to figure out how much of
the COVID gain in golfers we might expect to keep), roughly
90% of the respondents said they planned to play in '23 which,
inversely, translates to ~2M golfers with " intent to quit " but
~20M " leaning in " to continuing in our sport. Doing some
really loose and directional math, that might suggest that of
the ~3M golfers we tend to lose annually, we're fighting to
convince 2M to change their mind and we need to influence
another 1M who are " fence-sitters. " That's a stretch of the
research and the math but if you've got a better, fact-based
crystal ball, write and enlighten me.
Just for fun and to add a little frustration factor to trying to
figure out exactly what's happening to the golf consumer base,
let's juxtapose the quantitative, annually consistent NSGA
survey data of limited measures (participation, frequency, demographics)
to the most recent custom survey work we did in
conjunction with OvationMR and presented at the Quirk's
research industry confab back in March. The highlights from
that study which asked trend questions of each respondent
(i.e. what year did you start playing golf, were you new to
sport, how frequently did you play each of your non-freshman
years etc.) were similar to the NSGA results but not exactly
consistent:
* The new COVID golfers tended to be younger, more
female and slightly lower income ranges ($50-$99K
vs. $100K+)
May 2023
PHOTO BY CRISTINA ANNE COSTELLO ON UNPLASH
The Pellucid Perspective - May 2023

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