EPISODE 95

Derek And it’s worth it for listeners to go check out that article. Because what we’re going to talk about today dives into the brand side of that conversation. KK&W, Tom Wallace, expressed some really nice sides from their expertise. So, definitely worth checking out. The fun thing about culture – fun, interesting, insightful, trying to think of the right adjective – as it relates to a brand, they’re not separate things. There’s a tendency to put culture on one side and think of that as internal core values. It’s how we communicate with each other, how we act around each other versus the brand, which, you know, we think of as your reputation, how you show up visually, verbally, etc. But they’re really connected at a club. Culture and brand shouldn’t be separate things. I think I’ve heard you say it’s the same coin. If this is all your club, this is your community, and there are two sides of that same coin.

Tucker And the coin analogy works well to say that on one side, your brand is your perception. It’s what people think of you. And then to us, your culture is really that experience. So if your brand is how people think of you, your culture is the reality. It’s what people actually feel when they’re around you. And I think it’s easy for a lot of people to assume that a brand lives in logos, your color, your website, those things, and that it’s just a visual layer of your club. But the brand is actually what members believe is true based on how they feel. Think about all of those different touch points that a club has – how they’re greeted, how the staff interacts with them when they order a meal, how events are set up, or how updates are shared with them. Maybe it’s their member dues or something like that. How that communication all lays out, that experience should be a reflection of that culture, rather than it being this facade that’s completely different than the way we interact

Derek A club’s staff, its employees, and its leadership are really the face of the brand. I think when we think of a club’s brand, we might default to the members. And that’s totally fair. They’re the ones paying dues and funding that club’s ability to thrive. But the staff are the ones who live and put that brand into action every day. They are the first people you meet at the valet, or even before that, maybe at the front gate when a guest signs in. They’re the ones that are answering the phone and using the tone and the language of how you want your brand to be conveyed and expressed. It even comes down to bartenders, and I know they’ve got a lot of tricks to do so, but it’s the bartender remembering a member’s drink or even their guest’s drink from the last time they were there. All of those things are part of this culture/brand relationship.

Tucker When we talk about understanding alignment, we’ll get into that in a second, but this comes up all the time. I just had a conversation last week with a club that said that the night and day difference for us was hiring a new front desk person who greeted us the way we felt like we wanted people to be greeted. So does that include new visual assets? No, that has nothing to do with that. That has to do with the way that someone is just trained properly and has the right kind of expression as they greet new people, and to say, yeah, that person does a great job of conveying who we are. And then I would make the argument that in order to get that right person, you need to know who you want to be and how that needs to come to life. And so moving on to the next part of this conversation is where the misalignment happens. And I think clubs get into trouble when they assume that a strong brand will automatically lead to a strong culture or the other way around. Like we have a great culture, so obviously everyone has to think about us in this one way. But we see misalignment in this all the time. This assumption really gets people down this road of saying, maybe we have a brand identity that’s very traditional, maybe the way that we think about ourselves is very clean and very formal. But when I go to the club, maybe someone shows up and they say, Wow, this is really casual and social and very modern, very different than a more traditional formal club. That’s a misalignment, and that becomes really hard to overcome when you think about hiring the right people to do the right job. What are you trying to explain to them?

Derek The two scenarios that we run into often are when guests visit a club and their reaction is, wow, that place was actually much more inviting and more welcoming and more enjoyable than I thought it was going to be and then the other reaction is is wow, I was really underwhelmed based on what I’d heard about that club and what I was expecting that experience to be. It didn’t live up to that. So whether it’s the first one, where maybe you’re over-delivering, but not telling the right story, or the second case, which is even worse, that’s a clear representation of misalignment. You and I had the chance to go to the NCA conference this past spring. And one of the speakers was a gentleman from Augusta. So people hold Augusta National up extremely high when it comes to brand, and many people will even reference the logo or the Masters, but the only thing that this gentleman spoke about, or at least the key component of what he talked about, was culture. He talked for an hour about values and how to find and train, and reward the people on his team that then could create that experience, and to really not only maintain but continue to elevate the brand that we all think of today. It was a great example.

Tucker And it happens, good and bad. I could sit here all day, and we could talk shop about all the bad examples that come up when either we’re talking to clubs or we’ve gone to a club and had a poor experience and said, Well, that didn’t align with the way that they sold me on what they were going to be at all. But that disconnection creates confusion. Honestly, what happens is, is that it makes it hard for your staff and your members to all be moving in the same direction, all be investing in the same capital projects, all making sure that they understand why we’re going to build a new refreshment station on the course and not necessarily investing in our pool or something like that. To understand who we are and how that experience comes to life is critical. But I think that it also goes with not going too far off. Who you want to be versus who you actually are, are very interesting conversations. And when we talked to KK&W, within this article, they say they shared this same issue from an operational side, to say the leadership might set a vision, but that might not meet what the staff or the members actually feel about the club. Or they don’t have the ability to actually do that. If we want to be a super formal, super traditional club, but everything in our facilities is all very modern and casual, and our main dining room is a sports bar, well, that makes it really hard for us to achieve what you want.

Derek One of the most common red flags of this misalignment, and I spoke to this a little bit, is surprise. It’s when a member or a guest says, I thought this would be different than what it is.

Tucker And that surprise, kinda going back to my last point, is that surprise could be good, and that’s really hard. It’s hard to say that when a guest comes and they go, that’s not what I thought it was, in a great way. You want to think, like, wow, that’s great, that’s positive. Where I hear that is, that’s not good. That means that we’re not setting the tone properly with our brand, or we’re not setting the tone at the front gate properly, because the rest of the experience does a great job. And how do we understand those things? We do a lot of this through our state-of-the-brand work, and we do all of this analysis on that. But to really find the fault lines within that experience and say, where’s the surprise happening, and let’s remove surprise from the equation when it comes to being very different than people think about us.

Derek What we do at Sussner, our work, is aimed at helping clubs authentically express the culture that they want, that they aspire to. And so when we go through that state of the brand and get that clarity, then our job really becomes about figuring out the proper, the most effective way to then express that visually, verbally, experientially throughout the club.

Tucker I just had a conversation with someone I know really, really well, and I was talking about a club that we had worked with. And they said, My kids love that club. I hate it. In my mind, I went, That is perfect. I didn’t say anything to them, but I went, that is the best thing I could hear because it wasn’t made for you, because the club aspires to attract those people. And when she meant kids, she meant her 25-year-olds. And to say that is their target market, and you don’t understand that, that’s exactly what you’re talking about. That is to say, who do we want to be? Who are we trying to attract, and what kind of culture service perception attracts those people? Our work is to understand where that is going and make sure that we do align with that, and we create the perception that we want to create. And while I could sit with you and we could be at a club, and we could talk about all the ways we could look at culture and all those other things. Culture is natural. It just kind of happens, and you can guide it and you can shape it, and it is great like that. But our goal is to just understand what the natural culture at a place is, and then how do we make sure the perception or that brand, the other side of that coin, meets that so that people get the experience before they get the experience.

Derek You have a brand, whether you’re proactively doing something about it or not. And you have a culture, whether you are fostering it, growing it, supporting it, or choosing what kind of culture you have, you have one. If you think of what KK&W does in helping clubs define that service culture, then our role is to come alongside and help show that club how the staff can leverage that culture, can lean into that, to make more of an impact at their club. You know, our role isn’t operational necessarily. We help doing that by establishing brand guidelines – how, when, and where to implement the brand in what ways so that it is expressing that culture. Messaging tools. We talked about not only the tone in which you speak or write, but even getting as granular as certain phrases or words that we do say or don’t say here because those do not align with that experience. And then, of course, all the visual assets, the way that we look across all our touchpoints.

Tucker One of the clients that we’re working with right now, we had a conversation yesterday about text messaging. It’s a form of communication, right? The club uses text to try to communicate with their members on what’s going on, and there are certain aspects of that. The conversation wasn’t about what the text should look like or exactly what it should say, but when we should be texting people and when we should be doing that. And that’s a part of the experience is do I text a member at 8 AM on a Monday morning? Well, I don’t know. Are half of our members retired, or are they working, because I’d be pretty annoyed if you sent a text to me at 8 a.m. on a Monday morning because I would be busy. And that’s the conversation that we have with clubs is how can we fit the brand and the culture and who our members are into the way that we communicate and the way we showcase all of those great things across the globe?

Derek You want members and the staff to be part of that culture, to not be misaligned but to be aligned, because when that does come together right, that’s when those amazing moments happen. It’s like being in the zone from an athlete or a golf sort of standpoint. It’s almost like you feel like you’re flying or you’re cruising or you’re not even thinking about it. You’re not even aware of it. You’re just doing it. I think when you see branded communication materials or spaces or environments or experiences and interactions, when you see that happening, whether that’s at your club or at another club, that’s a really great example of someone of a group of people that have figured it out and figured out how to do it authentically and in a relevant way, but in a way that inspires and engages everybody.

Tucker Right. And that branded experience, say you’re playing tennis at a court and there are windscreens on tennis courts, right? Well, what that windscreen looks like can inspire the experience that I will have. It sounds kind of ridiculous, but having a big colorful graphic on that can make you feel like you’re in a vibrant setting, and can actually influence you to have a certain type of time, versus having a very formal windscreen that has a very traditional tennis-oriented look to it can inspire that type of feeling as well. And so for us to make the case for these clubs that this is really valuable. You are influencing your members’ experience by also changing their perception of not only the club but the space that they’re in and the moment that they’re having. And so shifting to what you can do from an internal standpoint, what we’ve been talking about is more member-oriented. But whenever a GM comes to me and goes, How can we help our staff learn about our culture or build on our culture over time, my answer is always to try to capture moments or stories that represent the ideal culture that we’ve done. So there are going to be times when your staff does something. Think of these moments as learning times for new staff members. Maybe the bartender, to your point, remembers a guest’s drink, but they’ve only seen the guest once. And that experience is a great representation of how we want to be seen at the club. Well, that can be turned into an onboarding moment that can actually share what it means to showcase our culture in a great way that makes people learn rather than just kind of wait and see what happens.

Derek I was speaking with a club earlier this week. And one of the stories that they shared that happened organically was the gentleman working in the gatehouse when the guest, I think it was a guest of a member, arrived, maybe not a first-time guest, but they swiped their ID when they entered. And so it was as simple as going onto their computer, looking up the last time this person arrived, making a quick call to the valet two minutes up in front of the clubhouse, so that when that car pulled in and the guest stepped out of the car, the valet was able to greet that person by name and to say welcome back because they knew they had been there before. I’m not even sure that that was an intentional part of their unreasonable hospitality policy, but that has now become the standard. Because the guest was so delighted in that small moment of being recognized, it was a great example of what’s now becoming a permanent part of that culture.

Tucker A GM or board member, or we’ll say club leader, is listening to this conversation, and they’re thinking, all right, Derek, we need to work on this. What do they do? How do they start?

Derek It’s back to, does our internal culture match the experience that we say we’re delivering? Not aspirationally, like, are we walking the walk? Are we actually delivering on our value proposition? Because if those two things don’t match, and it’s easy for those two things to become misaligned, we’re so bogged down. And I think of what a general manager’s daily responsibilities are. I was playing golf with a GM recently, and the amount of emails and texts that this person had during their offseason was incredible. So the quantity of things that leaders at clubs are juggling, I don’t envy. It’s an amazing list of things. So that makes it that much more challenging than to not just focus on solving these short-term issues and problems, but to focus on actually providing the experience that we want to.

Tucker Right. It’s like a golf swing. There are a thousand things that you could be thinking about, and one of those things could go wrong, and that could influence the ball shape in one way, shape, or form. The exact same thing happens at a club. Thousands of different touch points. The chances that they all hit the same note every single time is very unlikely, but to understand those things is the first step. It’s to understand where we are going wrong, where we are not meeting where we want to be, and how we do that. But if you were to look at your internal culture and your experience and then also your perception, and say, where are we matching, where are we not matching? I’d also say if they don’t match, which one is more appropriate for what we want to be seen as moving forward? Is it the way that people currently think about us, or is it the experience that people currently have about us? Because if it’s the way that people think about us now, we need to change our service culture so that we meet that new standard around how we want to be thought of. If it’s vice versa, we need to think about re-looking at our brand and changing the brand to meet how great our service culture already is. And those are really difficult conversations for people to have if they’re trying to fix all 1,000 things all at once.

Derek And this is without us saying you need to start from step one, go back to the state of the brand, and start at ground zero and figure that out. And if you are past that and you’re already in the process of actively investing in your brand, just don’t let that work and the investments of time and finances that you’re putting into that stop at your marketing materials or your communication materials or your newsletter, or your website. The brand is such a strong tool. That brand book, that brand style guide, is so much more than how to use a logo and what colors to use. It can encapsulate all of these cultural elements and internal values that we’ve been talking about, and will help you bring this brand and who you are and the reputation that you want to express externally. It’ll help bring that to life internally, too.

Tucker Every step you take to strengthen your culture strengthens your brand. And every step that you take to clarify your brand will reinforce your culture. And I believe that as we go through this process with clubs all over the country, all different types of members, all different types of experiences, very rarely have they not come out on the other side with either clarity on how their culture needs to change based on what they want their brand to be in, or confidence that their culture is so fantastic. And now their brand meets that. It’s the coin, right? It’s the same coin. Our job is just to make sure that all those things are aligned to keep going.

Derek Private clubs that are thriving, that will be successful, that will grow in the way that they want to grow aren’t just the ones with the best logos or maybe even the best events. They’re going to be the ones where their staff, club leadership, and the members, all three of those groups, are in alignment and all three of those groups are proud to live that brand every day. It’s not having a membership that loves their brand and the reputation of their club. And a staff that hates to come to work every day because they don’t believe in the brand that they are representing for that specific membership. It’s when you get those three groups all aligned, that sense of pride, that sense of belonging that we always talk about, extends to all three. Sense of belonging is not just for members, it’s also for the leadership and the team.

Tucker As we sign off, I want to thank the KK&W team, Tom Wallace and team. Our conversations with them on this topic were fantastic. If you haven’t seen that article, go check it out. Like I said, it’s in Boardroom magazine, and you can learn more about them at KK&W.com. But if you’re ready to explore how your brand and your culture can work together, you can absolutely reach out to us at sus001.brethummel.com. And, as always, thanks for listening. Hopefully, see you on the next one.

Derek See you next time. Thanks for listening. Sussner is a branding firm dedicated to helping make a meaningful mark, guiding member organizations into the next chapter of their story. Learn more at sus001.brethummel.com.