A couple of months ago, we asked you take our Driver Satisfaction Survey. The objective was simple. We wanted to understand if buyers of some brands were more satisfied than those who bought others. It’s a simple but not unimportant metric. Sure, distance, forgiveness and optimizing the numbers on a launch monitor screen are all good things but there’s probably no better predictor of a repeat customer than satisfaction with a previous purchase.
All told, nearly 9,500 (9,470 to be precise) of you took the survey. Here’s what you told us.
The Demo Experience
We’ve discussed this before but it’s worth hammering home a few observations.
Golfers will typically try two to four drivers before purchasing a new one. Three is the most common number of drivers sampled during the buying process. Almost 18 percent of you report buying without demoing a single club. Whoa!Top Demoed Brands
With that in mind, here’s a breakdown of the brands that you tried before buying.
Not to imply the market leaders aren’t making great products but, by some measure, the deck is stacked. Most golfers try three drivers and more often than not, Callaway and TaylorMade are two-thirds of that equation.
At the risk of stating what surely must be obvious, many smaller brands simply aren’t given the opportunity to create happy customers.
What You Bought
Knowing what we know about who is in the demo conversation, we would expect conversation rates to be higher for the bigger brands. Here’s what you bought most recently.
Driver Satisfaction
Now that we understand what you bought, it’s time to move on to the meat of the survey. Ultimately, while what you bought is important, this survey was about understanding how satisfied you are with your purchase.
To arrive at those answers, we asked a series of questions.
First, we asked about the extent to which your driver has met your expectations. To keep charts clean, we’ve limited the display to driver brands purchased most often.
When we asked in what way drivers failed to meet expectations, accuracy, distance and forgiveness were listed frequently but the most common complaint is simply that the performance gains don’t justify the cost.
Go figure.
If it’s been five years since your last purchase, you might get some benefit but much less than that, and, well … take two big steps up the fairway (hopefully you’re in the fairway) and tell me if you play enough holes to make it worth $500.
If You Had It To Do All Over Again …
Next, we asked how likely you’d be to buy the same driver. Those of you who commented with something along the lines of “well, it would depend on what I was fitted for” aside, here’s what you told us.
Overall Satisfaction
Finally, we asked the classic Net Promoter Score Question: How likely are you to recommend your driver to a friend or colleague?
Fitting
As we dug through the results, it became clear to us that while brand certainly matters, there are other factors that contribute to consumer satisfaction. Many of the most interesting insights can be found around fitting.
Were You Fitted?
Early in the survey, we asked about the level of fitting associated with your purchase.
Next, we look at your driver purchases based on your level of fitting.
Circling back to our question about drivers meeting (or not meeting) expectations, there are a few additional insights to be gleaned.
Golfers who were fitted for their drivers are more likely to say it met or exceeded expectations. The likelihood of purchasing the same driver again is roughly the same for golfers who demoed and golfers who bought without trying. Golfers who went through a fitting process are significantly more likely to purchase the same club again. Finally, looking again at Net Promoter Score, golfers who get fitted are significantly more likely to recommend their drivers than those who didn’t.Does the Fitting Location Matter?
As much as we promote fitting, we also know that not all fitting is equal. With that in mind, we decided to take a closer look at what role fitting location may play in golfer satisfaction.
First, we needed to know where golfers got fitted.
To get a sense of your satisfaction with your fitting experiences, we asked how likely you would be to recommend your fitting locations. (Note: We’ve limited the results to only those locations which were listed more than 30 times.)
Respondents who were fitted at Club Champion locations were less likely to recommend it and there were significantly more detractors. I’d love to dig into this more to understand the reasons behind lower satisfaction levels. Anecdotally, friends who have visit Club Champion have specifically mentioned heavy upselling leaving a bad taste.
Brand Bias
Out of curiosity, we took an aside from fitting to look at brand bias.
Big Box and off-course purchases skewed slightly towards PING (28%). Nearly 60 percent of manufacturer facility fittings were conducted at Titleist and PXG locations. True Spec customers were more likely to buy TaylorMade—five percentage points more than Callaway and quite a bit more than PING and Titleist. Club Champion was reasonably well-balanced between the Big 4. While the sample size is smaller, Cool Club buyers bought significantly more Titleist drivers, followed by Callaway.Lastly, based on fitting location, we looked at how likely golfers were to buy same driver again.
Other Insights
Here are a few other interesting nuggets from the survey.
Scratch golfers demo the fewest clubs of any handicap group but most likely to be satisfied. As handicap increases, satisfaction decreases. Sixty-five percent of fittings were done indoors. However, outdoor fittings have higher satisfaction rates. Golfers who spend most money (more than $1,000) are most likely to be satisfied, though only marginally more so than those who spend $700 to $750. Satisfaction levels are roughly the same between $400 and $600. Only when the purchase price dips below $350 do satisfaction levels decline appreciably.The post 2021 Driver Satisfaction Survey Results appeared first on MyGolfSpy.