Mass produced golf clubs:

An opinion was posted on the Wishon Golf Forum regarding custom built clubs and I found Tom Wishon's answer to be very truthful.

Statement from a poster: There are FAR too few serious golfers out there. The vast majority of the golfers I see play at the game, they do not play the game. They rarely practice, they just show up every week or couple of weeks to drink, talk trash, and maybe gamble. Golf is mostly the excuse for drinking, trash talking and gambling. Most have grooved a bad swing and most either do not care or are not willing to put in the work to get better. They think they know golf because they have been playing for years, but in reality, they know little about the game.

And they are the last people to buy custom clubs. If they get a new stick, it will be a big name OEM for bragging rights with their buddies.

There simply are too few people like myself out there who are fighting to play this game well and willing to make the investment, which includes lessons as well as custom clubs (and maybe getting in better shape as well).

Tom Wishon's response: You're right about a big number of golfers out there not caring that much. You are also right about a bigger number who care more about impressing their buds with what they buy because they are of a belief that custom fitting only helps good players and for them, as long as they have a bad swing, the club's purpose is mainly to impress the buds.

No question that if we ever won the lottery around here to be able to fund a decent marketing blast to educate golfers about the real benefits of custom fitting over standard off the rack, there certainly would be a good number of golfers who would respond by going to see a clubmaker to be custom fit.

But to get into the minds of these other golfers who are so brainwashed by the image of what they play and the ego of impressing their buds, a separate marketing campaign would have to be created.

Do you remember the Apple Macintosh ad that played during the Super Bowl quite a number of years ago in which Apple used a George Orwell 1984 theme in which they portrayed all of the IBM users as being mindless sheep who would blindly follow each other to walk off a cliff? Their point was of course to say that all you people who buy the big IBM brand are not cool enough to realize Apple is the better way to go.

That's the approach you would have to take with these guys about which you speak. And really, that could be done to create a 180* shift in their ego image-based thinking. All you have to do is convey that when you buy the well known brand name club off the rack, you are not special in anyway because you are simply buying a mass produced, standard made, totally un-unique club just like MILLIONS AND MILLIONS of other mindless people are doing.

What's so special or cool about just being one of the masses when you could be so unique and special by buying something created from scratch for YOU and ONLY for YOU?

IMO that's where the message would have to be to really get to the mindless ones who are brainwashed by the big image and ego marketing.

TOM