Question 560 

Harry's response --

This inquiry reminds me of when I first started in golf, consulting for Square Two.   My assignment was two fold:-
1- Ping was suing them for patent infringement.   Since I knew Karsten Solheim from working together at GE they hoped that this would buy them time to change their irons to non infringing.
2- The LPGA did not want to renew the exclusive license that S-2 had.   They felt the clubs were cheap copies not fitting for their organization.   I was to design something better that could pass their scrutiny.  And persuade the team of Debbie Massey, Hollis Stacy and Amy Alcott that the new clubs were decent.

Well, it all worked out.   As the new designs were introduced to the market questions came in from the distributors and consumers.   The inquiries essentially asked why did we feel that our stuff was better than the big name competition - justify why anybody should buy them.   The S-2 people would get all excited, feeling that blow by blow explanations were needed, including a description of competitor's short comings.   I felt this approach was silly and would not go along with it.   It involved denigrating the competition, which is the road to disaster.

From my standpoint you first give the consumer as many facts as you can on the features of your equipment, laid out so they can readily see them.   This you have done in your Scigolf sites.   The consumer can look at data such as bounce, lengths, shaft selection, offset, pro grind on the leading edge, the steel used, the overall design, etc. and see if this is what he is looking for.   If he is a slicer he may feel the offset is not enough for him.   Or the head is too small for his eyes and optics.   He may not understand what some data means and asks questions.   Fine, you answer as well as you can.   By steering the consumer into the data sheets you get out of the trap of justifying your pedigree, your virtues as compared to competition and get him looking at what things our clubs have that are meaningful to him.  It could be that spine aligning or moment of inertia matching looks good to him and he hasn't found these in the other clubs he has been appraising.   We cannot appraise the competition for him - he must do that himself.

All in all we are offering clubs with a lot of features, at a good price.   I feel that is what we are selling.

The consumer has a second stage to face.   On an Internet purchase how can he tell if these things work for him?.   Show me - I'm from Missouri. Unlike Square Two, we don't have distributors all over the country where he can go to try out demos.   Don has been working around that with the 7 iron purchase program, which seems to have some success.   We custom fit the club and see if he likes it.

In special circumstances we could also offer to make a couple of clubs on consignment. Say an 8 iron and a 6 iron.   If he doesn't like them we can always use them as demos later.  Then our customers will feel they can more safely buy without getting skinned.

We did this for Jeff, who sent in this question.   Jeff wrote the club comparison which is here.

We cannot overdo this, of course, or we'll go broke.  If the inquiry is argumentative - if the fellow starts out with a chip on his shoulder - then we are better off looking for another customer.

Harry Lundberg

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