The way your club ultimately communicates its brand is intertwined with how your club lives to its brand and fulfills its brand promise. Your club’s brand is different from your club’s mission. A club’s mission declares who it is, what it provides, at what value and how your club is unique. It defines why your club exists today.
Not all clubs today have written mission statements that are incorporated into all aspects of their operating ethos. Every club, however, has a brand whether it is identified, articulated and pronounced in its current club marketing, both internally and externally or completely unacknowledged by the club.
A club’s brand is established by how it is perceived by its members, employees and the surrounding community it lives in. It is identified, recognized and labeled both by how it acts, treats its members, non-members and employees, and is formed by the intangible images both real and imagined that represent the aura of the club, through its products, services, core values, and culture it lives to every day.
The Mission Statement
A mission statement is created to describe what your club does from an internal perspective, often to inspire and motivate your employees but also to shape your member’s expectations on what experiences they should expect to enjoy with every visit to the club.
Here’s an example:
· XYZ Club is a member-owned recreational and social club, where a community of families and individuals enjoy the highest standards in aquatics, fitness, tennis, youth programming and quality cuisine. All programs are presented in attractive surroundings, and a comfortable and casual environment, with superior service provided by a highly competent professional staff.
This mission statement states the club’s purpose, but it also provides instructions to the club’s management and its employees in what they should be doing and achieving, to what level, in delivering a targeted outcome.
The Brand Promise
A brand promise, on the other hand, is a declaration of who your club is, and is then incorporated into the club’s banner to hold your club accountable for delivering a consistent deliverable to all its stakeholders.
Your brand starts with the promise you make to your members—but your ability to keep your promise ultimately determines the health of your brand. In other words, your brand is the culmination of expectations your members form over time based on the club’s actions and performance. It is the intangible asset that lives in the hearts and minds of your members and employees. Both groups become emotionally connected to the club’s brand and develop a fierce tribal loyalty to the club and among all the members and employees in its midst.
Club Brand Promise: Where Families Focus on Fun!
This brand promise declares that when you’re at the club, all you and your family have to worry about is to focus on having fun. As the club consistently delivers this promise, the aura surrounding the club becomes its identity and its label or brand. XYZ Club is then synonymous to “Families Focusing on Fun.”
Marketing Your Club Brand
Your club brand is communicated to its members, employees and the surrounding community by both outbound and inbound marketing.
Outbound marketing is what was traditionally thought of as marketing, in which a company initiates contact with potential customers or leads reaching out to noncustomers in the community at large surrounding the club’s gates. It is generally one-way communication utilizing print and banner advertising and many times cold calling. The marketer was generally outside the circle of communication rarely touching the new customer/member as they inquired about the club.
Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is the modern approach to marketing. Its communication is two-way and interactive with the potential customer/member. The marketer is generally inside the circle of communication, directing the electronic media via search engines optimization, member referrals and social media.
Because member-owned private clubs usually are membership through invitation only, inbound marketing is the only viable mechanism clubs should utilize when attempting to grow their membership, maintaining their club’s viability long-term. The selective member process (which is one of the covenants of a 501(c)7 nonprofit private club) will ensure the club is a community of like-minded members who share similar core values enjoying socialization among one another. Branding in all your electronic communications is paramount to ensuring your brand is effectively communicated and represented.
The best clubs with the best marketing programs recognize it is your current members that are the genuine brand holders and the ultimate marketers of the club. The best inbound marketing structure a club can initiate fully engages your existing members in an ongoing strategic communications structure. Inbound marketing via social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) are utilized best when pictures with captions are posted of your members having fun participating in the activities that personify your club’s brand.
Having a media relations/communications manager on staff is now a necessity as more and more of our club business and member relationships (from board to management to employees) travel through the conduit of electronic media—especially through our smartphones.
The Communications Strategic Plan
Establishing a communications strategic plan is also a new necessity in order for your club to take full advantage of all the opportunities a fully informed membership provides for your club. The goals of this strategic communications plan are to:
- Provide a cornerstone for creating consistent, effective communication while keeping the branded image of the club and its members in mind. It promotes the accurate and timely dissemination of information to the membership through all appropriate channels of communication. The information communicated should be professional, consistent, user-friendly and available across multiple communication channels in order to reach the largest audience possible.
- The look and feel of all communications should be consistent, and in accordance with the club’s branded image, logos and color schemes.
Establishing a brand promise and incorporating it into every communication and pronouncement coming from the club is essential to solidifying your club’s brand image solidly within the psyche of your members, employees and the community surrounding your club. The success of your brand, like the success of your club, is determined by how it consistently fulfills its promises on every level in all that it does every day.
Club Trends Spring 2019