Callaway Golf’s first brand campaign aims to make everyone a ‘Callaway person’

In its more than 40 years of business, Callaway Golf has never run a brand marketing campaign. But with golf’s popularity on the rise, the equipment company didn’t want to miss its chance to swing at potential new consumers while also solidifying its identity with experienced players.

“We don’t think golf should be something that’s a punishment,” Gordon Gray, director of marketing for Callaway, told Marketing Brew. “We want people to get out there and want to go and play…So our audience can encompass, and therefore bridge, those beginners, all the way through to quasi-Tour players.”

It’s a line that many companies in the golf space have toed in recent years as the sport’s public image has shifted from the country clubs of Caddyshack to a less buttoned-up Happy Gilmore vibe. In other words, golf is changing, and even its endemic brands are adjusting their strategies along with it.

In Callaway’s case, that means articulating the company’s messaging and persona in a brand campaign called “Nothing Beats This,” which Gray said will ideally take the brand out of the “friendzone” for a range of golfers.

Friendzoned

Gray and his team put about a year and a half’s worth of research into the new brand campaign, he said, including talking to company leaders, consumers, and retail, influencer, and athlete partners. A combination of qualitative and quantitative research led to the finding that Callaway was being friendzoned, Gray told us.

“People like us, but they don’t love us, and that’s a problem,” he said. “They like us enough to go buy our clubs, but do they love us enough to say that they’re a Callaway person. We aren’t there at that point, and that’s where we need to be.”

Increasing product competition in the golf equipment industry coupled with rising prices also sparked the idea for a brand campaign, Gray added.

Unbeatable

To transform Callaway’s relationship with golfers into something more serious, the Callaway marketing team set out to communicate “the why behind our company,” Gray said. The lead asset in the campaign, a 60-second video, positions Callaway as a brand focused on fostering joy on the green through picturesque shots of golfers, from toddlers to pros.

“What we see from our golfers is that they just want to enjoy it,” Gray said. “They just want to get out there with friends. They want to go play with three generations of their family. They want to go out for a little sunset session with their best buddy. They want to create these experiences around golf.”

The campaign, which also includes content from influencer partners and a retail component, started running on video and social channels Dec. 2 and is set to be a “multiyear platform” with additional activations to come during big golf moments like Father’s Day and Women’s Golf Day, according to Gray.

Family affair

The cast of the 60-second spot is wide-ranging; it includes pro golfers, content creators like Roger Steele and the Good Good golfers, Callaway employees, and even Gray’s young children, whom he said are learning to have fun on the golf course in their own ways.

“My son loves to put a speaker on, and he gets his Gatorade, and he gets to drive the golf cart every now and then,” he said. “That’s his ‘Nothing Beats This’ moment.”

As is par for the course (pun intended) with many brand campaigns, Gray’s goals are more focused on reputation than sales, and he said he’ll consult Callaway’s brand tracker to see if people perceive the company as more relatable as the campaign rolls out, as well as whether or not it’s driving growth among new golfers.

Already, Gray said the rise of golf in pop culture has impacted Callaway’s business. The brand’s Happy Gilmore 2 collection in collaboration with Netflix “flew off the shelves” and accompanied a “massive uptick in interest” in golf around the time the movie came out, he told us. By continuing to emphasize diversity and enjoyment, Gray said he hopes Callaway can contribute to a sustained interest in the sport beyond this year.

“People are seeing the barriers to golf getting broken down, and that’s honestly a really great thing for us,” he said.