Herman School of Business
Does your customer Golf...or Skateboard?
The number of rounds of golf are declining. How can that be? I stopped playing as much golf as I wanted to because you could never get a tee time, there were so many people playing every day. When I was a sales manager in my thirties, and my team was “out making sales” I would head out to the course to get in a round of golf before our end of the day meeting to wrap up how they did. The course was swarming with people in their thirties, forties, fifties and beyond. My mantra used to be “Doesn’t anyone work anymore?”
As time went on in the seventies and eighties golf courses had to develop reservation systems to get tee times if you wanted to whack the ball around, for me about a hundred times for eighteen holes. Then Tiger Woods came along and younger people discovered golf. But the tee times were already taken up by the hard core golfers who were already tuned in to the beauty of walking the fairways and listening to the breeze and looking at the landscape that included ponds, rock walls, flowers, and incredibly lush green grass. And since younger people couldn’t get on the course, they went elsewhere for fun.
Golf cost money. With demand so high for tee times the prices went way up. And eventually the marketplace responded. The older golfers stopped playing as much for health reasons. As each age group “moved up” there was no younger group filling in for the older players who stopped playing. Remember, when the younger demand was created by Tiger, there was “no room at the first tee” for them. Crowded courses, higher costs, and maybe those plaid pants scared away the new generation of golfers. So now there are less golfers playing golf.
Symphony Orchestras have experienced the exact same phenomenon in that thirty years ago the fifty year olds bought out the seats…and kept doing that for thirty years. But since God has called most of them home…and there was never a rush from younger people to come hear a Symphony Orchestra…as season ticket buyers died off, the seats went empty. And now there is a scramble to get younger people interested in coming to the Symphony. Funny thing though, they bring in people like Art Garfunkel to sing with the Symphony to inspire ticket sales…but no one under forty knows who Art is.
Here’s the point. If your customer base has been those baby boomers with lots of spunk and money…what are you doing to attract the skateboarders who are the next generation of buyers for products and services? As your customer base fades away what are you doing to replace them?
Gotta go now…it’s my turn on the half-pipe.
- Posted: 28 February 2008
- Comments: 0
- Category: Running a business
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