Ep 123: Make Every Experience Unmistakably Yours

I just had a conversation literally two days ago with, um, a person for a club who said, "We just renovated one of our-- We have two golf courses.

We just renovated one of them.

Both have different architects, and we've restored or, or, or renovated or fine-tuned this one club enough that now we feel that instead of it being called the north course or the south course or the second course, it actually needs a brand.

It needs its own name.

It needs its own proper identity." And I think that kinda keys into this nicely.

So to figure out how to do that right, how to do it meaningfully, and how to do it with respect to the, the master brand of the club so that it's not hanging out there treading water.

[chuckles]

When, uh...

Let's start just there.

How do you know when an amenity or an experience has earned its own identity? And I say earned, right? It's like, do you build it? And we'll get into this in a little while, but building it versus doing it.

Um, do you build it before or do you let it kinda sit and grow its own natural identity? But for you, when a club is coming to you and says, "You know, we-- I think we have this opportunity to tell a unique story," but how do you know from your perspective if it's the right time, if it's the right, uh, if it has the ability to, as you would say, tread its own set of water?

It's a good question, um, and I'm hoping you're gonna come back at this with more quant-quantitative-

[chuckles] Yeah

... uh, data-oriented answer.

'Cause to me it's more of a, man, I hate to say it, but it's like you, you know it when you see it.

You know it when you feel it.

Um, when, when-- I think when the members start to have already identified this specific amenity, um- Take the bar, for example.

When they've stopped calling it the grill, and they start calling it the card room, when they've adopted it as something that's actually part of their culture, it's almost like in hindsight now we can see that it's earned its place.

Um, sometimes, you know, our team doesn't have the benefit of waiting that-- Sometimes we do, and then we can come in and uncover that story.

But sometimes, like in the case of this golf course that I was talking about, it's gonna have a new identity, and it's going to be a new experience to the members, so it doesn't have the longevity to have earned that spot yet.

And we have to sorta create that perception, that brand of that course within the overall experience and sort of guide them down that path.

But I think there's-- You know, we talk about it all, all the time about how in many cases the identity's already been earned because the experience is so strong, it already exists.

Then it's kind of us, uh, figuring out how to articulate that.

The whole idea around does it have its own subculture, um, which is a really hard thing to look at.

If you're, if you're too close to the sun, it might be hard to see that.