“It’s not your dad [or] your grandfather’s golf anymore. It’s a lot of young people. A lot of people from the NBA, the NFL [are] all playing golf now,” Douglas said.
The data also suggested that these younger golfers usually avoid digital ads, nudging the brand and agency toward experiential activations and tournament sponsorships.
“Our competitors are Apple, Samsung, Sony [and] Bose. I mean, huge players with really large marketing budgets. The reality is that we need to use data in order to discover these more niche audiences where we can actually get some traction,” said Michelle Esgar, director of marketing and experience at Panasonic Consumer Electronics.
Panasonic’s North America marketing team had to persuade its product and engineering-oriented global leaders to experiment with the audience.
“When you say something like, ‘We want to target golfers,’ the first [thing people say is], ‘But these headphones aren’t designed for playing golf. That’s not their purpose, necessarily,’” Esgar said.
Strategy pivots are especially hard to execute at global brands that require permission to experiment. But once Esgar’s team put assets in market, a sales bump proved the agency was right.
“There are groups internally who, originally, made us jump through hoops trying to talk about that audience and now are coming to me saying, ‘Well, we need to be primary sponsors of the PGA Tour,’” Esgar said.
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