Tuesday, February 21, 2012

It seems the big OEM's are truly becoming marketing companies first and club manufacturers second. Are they?

Good call there for sure. If you follow the golf industry closely from a business standpoint, you could see this starting to happen back in the 1990s when several of the leading OEM companies decided to do an IPO and get on the stock market. Once you do that, the financial side puts more pressure on the company to keep pushing their sales and profit. And from that come product development decisions that are made much more on the basis of "what can that do for our sales" compared to what can that really do for the golfers.

PING could be the exception. Not only have PING remained a privately held company and chosen not to go public, but they have always operated their company with an engineer as the leader of the company, and not people from marketing, sales or finance.

Back in the 1980s before any of the golf companies went public, it seemed that the CEO or Pres of every golf company was a person who worked their way up through the engineering or product development side of the company. Then when all this heavy competition for sales and profit hit the industry, all the CEO's came from sales/mktg/finance.

Anyway, it really would be a dream if the majority of regular consumer golfers could know all this as well as know the facts of life about custom fitting versus standard off the rack. Maybe someday that will happen.

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