There’s a fine line between genuinely trying to connect with a new audience versus just marketing your way into it for the sake of appearances.

That’s been the challenge facing golf coaching and gear brand Performance Golf, which wants to make the game more accessible to new players, including women, despite the sport’s reputation of being dominated by wealthy men.

According to research by the National Golf Foundation, there are roughly seven million women out there who have never played traditional golf but have expressed a strong interest in giving it a try. Many of these women, however, cited an intimidation factor, said Performance Golf CMO John Hardesty, and didn’t feel that the “door was open” for them since they weren’t already familiar with the sport.

Performance Golf’s solution, together with its strategy and design agency Motto, was to develop a beginner’s program, which launched in January and focuses on golf etiquette, terminology and basic techniques.

Driving Change

Motto helps its clients find a specific idea “worth rallying around,” said Co-Founder and CEO Sunny Bonnell, so that all of a brand’s content speaks to a central message.

For Performance Golf, that message has been about inclusivity and putting extra emphasis on recruiting more women to the sport.

Inclusion is a core part of Performance Golf’s strategy, rooted in its founder’s own experience, said Hardesty. The company’s founder, Brixton Albert, didn’t grow up with access to country clubs or expensive lessons, but he always harbored a desire to play golf and make it more accessible to others.

Rather than drafting entirely unique messaging to target women, Performance Golf is producing beginner-friendly content for all genders, said Hardesty. The brand has also created video ads that feature internet personality and golf coach Erika Larkin, who is also one of the instructors at Performance Golf. The ads include testimonials from women who have completed the program.

Featuring female role models gives women viewers someone to “connect with” whose experience they can relate to, said Hardesty. “Erika Larkin speaking to you is gonna be different than a Hank Haney,” he added, a reference, for all the non-golfers among our readership, to Tiger Woods’ former coach.

Golf can be a rewarding experience for anyone, Hardesty said, so long as it feels approachable. “But you can’t really love it if you’re losing golf balls every hole,” he said, or struggling to figure out “how to swing a golf club.”

Performance Golf is also framing the game as an activity that couples can do together and encourages men who already play to invite their wives, which the brand does through testimonials from couples who have attended golf classes together.

A Swing and a Miss

These approaches go deeper than “surface-level solutions” like pink product collections, for example, said Motto’s Bonnell – and customers can see the difference.

Motto once worked with a honey brand that wanted to use bees from a specific farm in a developing country. But when Motto offered to fly the brand’s marketing team out to meet the farmers they’d ostensibly be working with, the brand’s response, according to Bonnell, was “Oh, no, that’s just the story we want to tell.”

Motto opted to fire its client rather than backing a brand with an inauthentic message.

Similarly, consumers are more opinionated and values-driven than they used to be, Bonnell said, so “you can’t pull those sleights of hand anymore.”

They “won’t drink the Kool-Aid for very long without calling you out,” she added.

Since Performance Golf’s goal of inclusivity goes all the way back to its founder, “opening the door” for new players has always been part of the brand’s culture, said Hardesty. The founding story, he added, was “the DNA” behind today’s messaging.