Minority to Major Player; 5:1 Brief Intro and First Pitch

For our final project of the year, we were given a brief to pitch to Bear named ‘Minority to Major Player’ which entails taking 5 minority sports (korf ball, squash, judo, golf, drone racing) and finding a way to rebrand them to gain more popularity. Me and Junaid worked together and got given golf. The main focus of this project was to learn how to pitch properly so we would do a series of presentations in our groups. Our first presentation was to Derek and Steve Spacey and we had to produce three insights and activations for golf.

We first sat with Derek and the other students doing golf to share our opinions and research on golf.

Me and Junaid also visited the local driving range and interviewed some people there with questions about the sport. We asked a 30 year old man who was playing and he said he is originally from Manchester so there is a rural vs urban difference compared to London. Renting clubs is expensive, they can range from £500 to £2k or second hand £40. He would improve the costs if he could. He’s only ever gone to seen a golf game once, doesn’t really spectate, just plays for fun with friends.

We asked some male workers in the golf store at the driving range who said that juniors play on Saturdays, their demographics ranges from 6-70 yrs both male and female. The range made £60 million a year ago, equipment ranges in price. Improvements they could make would be creating free under 16 clubs and passes, they emphasised that golf teaches etiquette, wishes there was more involvement in schools with government funding.

I also asked my female colleague at work to get a female perspective of the sport and she said it is a male dominated sport, boring, expensive, that woman who play are weird (not really sure what she meant by this but I understand what she means lol), it's a controversial sport with some racial issues. The top golfer is Tiger Woods being black in a white sport, She's played Pitch and Putt, which is a quicker version of the full game and said she liked it because she was with friends rather than alone.

Me and Junaid brainstormed some ideas and created a moodboard to showcase in our presentaion.

This was our presentation featuring our three insights and activations: (read left to right)

Some of the things we discussed included how golf is perceived to be played by older white males, it can be expensive making it inaccessible for some. It’s also a quiet sport so it lacks a lot of atmosphere. Tiger Woods is the most notable golf player and Tyler The Creator’s golfwang clothing brand for golf wear was mentioned. There’s different formats to the sports whether it’s outdoors or indoors and you can play on your own or with friends.

Our overall feedback was immediately that our visuals are shit. The client can't imagine what the finished outcome can look like from a shit mockup so we need to improve on these. The ideas are all good with good insights ad we've differentiated between getting our audience to either play or watch golf. For our research they said we need to backup the claims we are making with evidence.

For insight 1, we wanted a solution for how expensive golf equipment can be so we thought of creating a website for second hand golf equipment. The feedback we got from this idea was that the idea is similar to Depop, and they asked us if we're sure it doesn't already exist. Also, our mockup is trash.

For insight 2, we wanted to get YouTubers who are popular with the youth to promote golf by playing with each other on a YouTube channel that uses clickbait to draw in views and attention. They really liked this idea which is funny because this was the idea me and Junaid were least confident about. Using clickbait is cheap but good because it works with the youth that watch videos on YouTube. We need to look at branding our own YouTube channel and should look at KSI and the sidemen and the concepts they do and possibly even creating merchandise (because Derek's son really wants KSI merch). We could even look at involving off duty footballers who play golf in their spare time and connect it to the premiere league.

For insight 3, we created an under 16's free golf pass to make the sport more accessible to the youth. They said our pass looks shit and needs to be sexier but the idea works.

Derek and Steve suggested we roll with insight 2 out of the three because it was the strongest out the three.