Relationship with the brands
(Excerpts from an interview with Pinemeadow Golf)
Previous: Explain the difference between a clone golf club and a big-brand club...
Me: Is there any formal communication between Pinemeadow Golf and the big brand companies?
Guy Mount III: Sure, it's a small industry. We go to the tradeshows, we know people at all the major golf manufacturers, and it's a very professional relationship.
We have been doing this for 20 years. Our goal is to do what they don't do. Our goal is also to do it legally. We sell to retailers in the United States - the last thing we would want to do is to sell them a club that Callaway would object to - because that big retailer's going to get sued as well as us.
Bryan O'Doherty: We think that the big name brand companies are great. We think they're great competitors. We don't really see outselves competing head on though.
We think that we're helpful in bringing people into the game for one. We do get our share of really good golfers for whatever reasons - they're not status conscious or they've figured it out, just like I figured out buying a Compaq clone in the early 80s was preferable to buying an IBM PC, because it was actually a better machine.
I think there's a large group of those customers that we get. But we're not competing head-on-head and frankly I don't know that we take much of their market. I think we have our own marketplace. And they have their own marketplace.
Guy Mount III: You might get a man who's a TaylorMade owner whose wife wants to take up the game. And her husband says, "I don't know if she's really going to like the game."
He's going to make the decision to buy her set of clubs from us. And if she likes the game, continues to play the game, and gets better at it, they may go and buy her a set of TaylorMade clubs, or Pings, or Callaways.
But that first set might be our set because if she doesn't like the game, they've made a little mistake, a $150 investment with us versus a $500 investment with a brand. Golf is a very tough, frustrating game and so that's a real issue.
Bryan O'Doherty: There's some interesting analogies right now in the luxury car market. The Wall Street Journal just had an article about how you define luxury, now that Hyundai or Kia (whichever make it is) has some incredibly inexpensive cars that have all the luxury features of the luxury auto makers.
It's getting hard now to figure out how you differentiate these from the BMW or Mercedes when the features are the same. The functional features and the performance may be similar but there may be some important psychological aspects that make one preferable to the other.
It may be different things that provide that satisfaction to the customer. It may be that someone likes to take complete pride in having figured it out and got the most incredible deal in the world and the best value.
And there may be the other one who has tremendous psychological satisfaction in owning the perceived top-most desired brand.
