Bonnie Scoggins has a new job and 41 club brands to get to know.
After seven years with Invited, Scoggins recently joined Concert Golf Partners as Chief Marketing Officer. One of her first priorities is understanding what makes each club in the portfolio distinct and how Marketing can better communicate it.
Rather than approaching the portfolio with the goal of creating a more uniform Concert identity, Scoggins says the work starts at the individual club level.
That means looking at each club’s history, membership, market, culture, competitive position and member experience. It also means understanding what is already working before making changes.
“I think one of the biggest mistakes a new marketing leader can make is coming in and immediately telling everyone what they should be doing,” Scoggins says in our latest interview. “You can have a great playbook and still be solving the wrong problem.”
At each club, Scoggins wants to hear from the General Manager, Membership, Member Experience, Private Events and other department leaders. She is also particularly interested in longtime employees who may have a different perspective on what makes the club special.
“There might be a locker room attendant who has been there for 30 years, or someone on the golf or grounds team who has watched generations of members come through the club,” she says. “Those people often have an incredible understanding of what makes the club special.”
Those conversations can uncover pieces of a club’s identity that have become so familiar internally that they are easy to overlook.
For Scoggins, the goal is to identify those differentiators and give each club the resources and infrastructure to communicate them more effectively.
“There may be a red thread that connects the portfolio and reinforces the strength of Concert, but I don’t want Concert to be the hero of the story,” she says. “The club should always be the hero.”
Scoggins will dig deeper into club identity during “The Club Industry’s Identity Crisis” at the C+RB Engagement Summit, Oct. 5–6 at the University Club of Chicago. Register here.
