EPISODE 81

Tucker And I would say, if you have an opportunity within an anniversary, this is the time to think about your brand, modernizing it, and moving forward. That’s what I want to talk about today. 

Derek You think about all of the reasons to celebrate, to celebrate your club, to celebrate your brand. Some of these milestones are momentous. As you mentioned, the 25th, 50th. One club we’re working with just landed on 110. Another club we talked to the other day is coming up on 130 years. When we think about when clubs do take advantage of this opportunity and they do celebrate a momentous year, we’ve noticed a handful of things that they could be doing better that I think would help make these events more successful. It would help them leverage their brands a little bit better. I think the first challenge or problem is that when the clubs don’t do it. I think not taking advantage of, especially if the number of years ends in a zero or a five, to not take advantage of a 25 or a 30 or a 40. That’s just a missed opportunity. It’s just a perfect reason to celebrate. So I don’t know why clubs don’t do it. It could be that they’re overwhelmed with other activities, with daily tasks, or maybe it’s just that they don’t think it’s an important enough number, but I think that the members would find that opportunity to be really, really fun. 

Tucker So let’s talk about the clubs who do it and what we’re saying when, Hey, you’re starting to celebrate this. Let’s say you’re getting into your 50th year as a club in maybe a year or two, and you’re saying, What should we do for this? How should we go about this? What do clubs normally do wrong or what goes wrong when they start thinking about how to emphasize this anniversary? 

Derek It’s a great question. I think the one that we see the most is when clubs focus too much on the past. So, yes, this is a celebration in this case of 50 years, but it’s a celebration of today looking forward. So I think when we get too nostalgic, all we do in these types of celebrations is focus on 50-year-old photos and 40-year-old photos only. I think having some of that mixed in, and we’ll talk about how to do it right here in a little bit, but only focusing on the old is just going to reinforce the feeling of being old instead of being fresh or new or evolving or growing. 

Tucker And that’s hard for a lot of clubs. It’s counterintuitive, right? We’re going to celebrate 50 years. Let’s showcase all of these great photos, for example, of the last 50 years. And that’s amazing. But if you only focus on materials and photos that are old, you will seem very old and I don’t think that’s always the best thing in the world. It’s great to feel like you have heritage. It’s not always great to be like, wow, this place is kind of old. So that’s an awesome one. I also think another one is the lack of alignment within the current brand. I think there are a lot of clubs who look back and say, that offering the amenities that we have might be a little bit different today, but what we’re really from, where we came from, was this place. Let’s just talk all about the beginning of the 50 years versus maybe the last 10 of the 50 years. And that creates this lack of alignment with what members expect and what they know the club and brand for today. That can make it really hard and it makes younger members actually feel kind of conflicted around the club to say, I don’t know this club for this. Is that what we’re going to be? What are we celebrating and how does that affect our next generation of members? 

Derek And to your point, in that 50 years, a lot of things can change. So while you’re celebrating 50 years of longevity, 50 years of surviving and thriving as a club, some clubs might not be proud of some aspects of their history. And there may be things – we know of clubs who have certain types of memberships and those memberships have evolved over the years. You think about being more or less inclusive or exclusive, et cetera. There’s one club that we work with that basically told us, We don’t care about our history. The way that we came about and how we evolved into who we were, maybe that wasn’t that intentional 40, 50 years ago. So I think, to your point, a 50-year celebration is more about a celebration of the future than it is about the past. And if our brand today tells a story of where we’re going, it kind of goes back to that first point. We can’t get too focused on the past. 

Tucker The last thing I want to harp on because I want to shift into what the opportunity is and what clubs can do to really take advantage of that opportunity. But the last thing that they do wrong or that doesn’t go as great as it could is they have short-term thinking about this. There are a million things going on at a club. And I empathize with the GMs and the membership directors and communication directors that are saying, Hey, this is just another thing I have to get done. But short-term thinking on this anniversary can be really harmful to just the overall opportunity. Thinking about this as just a one-off event, we’re just going to celebrate it once on that 50-year date, have a big party, show a bunch of old photos, move on, the sun rises the next day, and we’re just going to keep moving forward. That’s a really big missed opportunity. And I think that that one event normally just falls flat for the people who don’t understand what the impact is here. Are we trying to move forward? Are we trying to stay back? Are we just going to go through a slideshow? How are we going to use this and feel more like a celebration rather than an obligation for the staff who feel like they just have to do something? 

Derek So talk about the opportunity. If clubs are recognizing that this is something that we can be doing, we should be doing, are you telling me that I should be doing this every year, every five years? What’s the opportunity that we’re missing out on by not doing this thoughtfully and consistently? 

Tucker The frequency is dependent on how much your club likes to celebrate that history would be my answer to that, whether you do it, like you said, on the fives or how you move forward. I like to think about it on the big ones. I like to do it on 25, 50, 75, a hundred. That makes a lot of sense. There’s a lot of time that passes. And those are also the generations that really pass through. You think every 25 years, a whole new set of generation is new, not only within your club but within society in general. So that’s like a really nice pivotal moment for that. You can also look at the tens if that’s a good opportunity. If your club changes a lot, I think that tens is pretty standard. You think of like 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, those types of things. So that’s kind of the frequency I’d look at. But as an overall opportunity, anniversaries are a really rare chance to reflect on where you’ve been, but they are the perfect moment to reset the brand. If I think of what the opportunity is, I think a reset is your biggest opportunity within the brand because you have a captured audience ready to say, Hey, I’m really excited to talk about where we’ve been. But for you to say all generations, here’s where we’ve been, here’s where we’re going, it allows you to do three main things. One, it reconnects with current members. Think about members who have been with the club for a long time. It reminds them of the great times that they’ve had. It reminds them of all the reasons why they’re a member of the club, and really helps them remember what makes this place so special. Two, it reintroduces the club to people who might have kind of drifted away from it for a while. Or maybe they’ve had an opportunity to look at other clubs. It reintroduces them to say family, friends, guests, things like that. Here’s who we are. Here’s what we’re all about. And then it also builds emotional connections. Thinking about where we’ve been is a really emotional place for a lot of people. That nostalgia, like you talked about, is an emotional tool for us to talk about the past and allow you to feel a sense of pride and connect with kind of this arc of how we’re going to get to the next stage of where we’re going. 

Derek I think the tens is ideal. When you said the word reset, reset the club’s brand, 10 years makes perfect sense. The lifespan of a club’s mission statement. 10 years is the perfect time to reevaluate it, reflect on it, and decide if it’s still accurate or if it needs to be fine-tuned. 10 years is a long time. Think back to your club, what you were doing 10 years ago, and what the leadership looked like. Clubs that we work with have an entirely different membership today than they did 10 years ago. The cadence that works so well with the cadence of branding – if a club said to us outside of the anniversary and we have these conversations where people say, How often should I be thinking about my brand in general? And while there are annual activities and quarterly activities, 10 years is, I think, the perfect time to really be thinking about how to do this meaningfully. 

Tucker When I say reset, I think when we talk about branding, and we’ve had a whole conversation about this, like your brand is not your logo. So when we say reset, we’re not saying let’s change the primary identity, the primary logo, and the name of the club every 10 years. That’s way too much. But to say maybe there are supportive things, maybe there are tournaments we should look at. Maybe there’s the ecosystem of your brand. What does that look like and move that forward every 10 years to reset it, to reassess it is a perfect way to do that. But let’s talk about how to get it right. So what does it look like for us to move this forward for clubs? What steps can they take to ensure that they’re doing this anniversary work for the brand, for the members, and for the club at whole? 

Derek You’ve kind of alluded to this already. The first one is to find an appropriate blending or combination of how much of the past we’re going to focus on and celebrate and how much of the future we can infuse into that. Storytelling is such a great opportunity to highlight some of the great momentous moments throughout the lifespan of a club that has landed you today, but then to find some really engaging ways to connect them to what that might look like for the club in the future. There’s a line that I think you came up with in one of the projects that we’re working on. It’s, we’re making memories every day. We’re creating new history right now. And so I think blending the past and the future rather than just focusing on the past is the first step. 

Tucker From that same project, and I don’t want to steal all of their stuff because this is really relevant, but they’re going through an anniversary shift right now. And so the tools that we’re using to communicate that to membership is the line that today’s moments become tomorrow’s traditions is so true. Think about the things that you celebrate every day and why you celebrate them and why that’s so special to the older members. The stuff that happens at the club right now, every season, every day will be special for members as they get older and we need to recognize that. So celebrating history and storytelling is really important. I also think that there’s an opportunity to blend the past and future within the visuals and the messaging. How do we communicate who we are? How do we communicate where we’ve been and why that does a great job of helping us see who we’re going to be? And those values tend to be long-term. We try not to say we’re a completely different club in all aspects. There’s some reason for who we have been to where we’re going. The next step is all about making it all about members. There’s a level of,  this is a member pride initiative. If you think about making members really excited about this, your anniversary is the celebration of those members and those moments who have made the club what it is today. It’s not about saying the club is amazing. We’ve done so much stuff. Look at the leadership. Look at all of that. It’s about look at the members. Look at what they’ve accomplished. Look at all of the memories we’ve made over the last X amount of years. Let’s celebrate that. Let’s move that forward. 

Derek That celebration of members, whether it’s past presidents, notable people, people that maybe are credited for creating a certain tradition, whether that’s a positive tradition or maybe one that’s a little bit more notorious, those can inspire the younger members. The average age of people coming into clubs is like 42 or 43 years old now. And when they reflect and sit with the members that are 70 years old and those members are telling the stories of these great traditions that they created or came up from, you can see it in the 42-year-old’s face. They’re already envisioning and anticipating what that version of that future tradition will look like for them and for their family and for their friends. 

Tucker This is also a great opportunity to build excitement for the next generation. And you’re talking about the generation of members, and I absolutely agree with that, but it’s also the next generation of the club when you say, let’s use the milestone of the 40th anniversary of our club to draw people in and create energy around what we want to accomplish. Let’s create some buy-in around the improvements and initiatives. I know plenty of clubs right now who say, I wish we could get members to agree that we should improve X, Y, or Z. This is your opportunity to say this larger initiative, this master plan, this is how we’re going to move our club forward. And here’s why it makes a lot of sense for our next 10 years or our next 25 years, or however we want to phrase that. 

Derek So that takes us to the third step, which is to be thinking beyond this specific event, whether that’s looking ahead towards 10 years from now and starting to think about what that celebration looks like. Branding and celebrating your brand is a very aspirational future-looking initiative. Brand is not your logo. Your brand is your reputation. And so these sorts of events can help your club start to create or reinforce the legacy that it wants to be known for and can either establish, refine, or like I said, evolve the reputation of the club as you want it to be. 

Tucker Absolutely. Thinking about the next era of this club and saying, what do we want our reputation to be, and then how do elements from our past make that reputation happen and how do we reinforce that reputation with things in the past, not what has our reputation been and how do we get back to that? It’s what do we want to be and how does our history help us get there? That is super important. Developing that strategy around building the legacy as a tool, rather than this kind of benchmark that we’re always going after. With a lot of the clubs we work with, we talk about your greatest competitor is yourself, your previous self. The members that you work with, the members that have been with you for a long time, they remember the club in a certain way. Your job is to help paint the picture around what you want to be and how that past club helps us get there and why that makes a lot of sense. 

Derek What that means then is that this is an opportunity to create a launch pad. This is an opportunity, I think, to not make the mistake of doing a great celebration and then not doing anything else for the next five or 10 years. It’s not the end. This celebration is not the means to the end. Think of it as the kickoff or the start or the boost of energy that will help you, your brand, and your brand foundation set and reinforce those aspirational goals, conversations, and visions to think about what that celebration might look like 10 years down the road. 

Tucker Going back to what we are trying to do from a leadership standpoint, I think a lot of people go, let’s throw a party. Let’s have swag. Let’s just make this easy and fun. Okay. Sounds good. The real point that we’re trying to make is this isn’t just about a party. This is about you establishing what the next anniversary looks like and for us to say this milestone is a good opportunity to talk about the next milestone versus this milestone is here to talk about the establishing of the club in general. That gets members excited. That gets members bought in. This is an awesome opportunity to say, who are we? Where are we going? What are we all about? Wrapping up here into, what is this? To me, I think the best way to talk about that is it’s the biggest missed opportunity that clubs have because they just treat it like a party rather than an initiative. 

Derek My best takeaway out of this was the sentiment that as a club, we’re in the business of making memories. We’re in the business of providing experiences and that taking advantage of opportunities like celebrating a key milestone or a key anniversary is just a tremendous opportunity to create tomorrow’s traditions today. 

Tucker More than just looking back, but is a chance to reintroduce the club, re-energize members, and reposition the club for the future. And it’s something that clubs shouldn’t take for granted. 

Derek Our business just celebrated 25 years. We spent the whole year celebrating it in our own fun ways. And I hope you and your clubs do the same.

Tucker All right. Until next time. 

Derek Sussner is a branding firm specializing in helping companies make a meaningful mark. Guiding marketing leaders who are working to make their brand communicate better, stand out, and engage audiences to grow their business. For more on Sussner, visit Sussner.com.