Rewriting The Sports Marketing Playbook: How Manors Is Becoming The Most Memorable Brand In Golf

With very much a brand first business, we put a huge huge amount of stock into brand, something that's really important in fashion and the space that we're in. So if you wanted to get a little bit more into the soft factors of it, which is probably the more fun part, manners has this idea that golf is not a sport to be mastered, but a game to be explored. Every other golf brand is basically trying to say, "This is going to make you better." And we don't have to say that, but we're never trying to say that. So all we're trying to do is, how do we entertain golfers? Like, what is a story that isn't being told right now? I'm Eric Fulwiler and this is Scratch, bringing you marketing lessons from leading brands and brands, rewriting the rule book from Scratch for the world of today. Hey everyone, it's Virin here. I am the executive producer of Scratch and of rival media. You typically don't hear my voice and yes, you are missing the salary tones of Eric Fulwiler this week. I've stepped in to host this very special episode of Scratch with Alex Ames of Manor's Golf. So Manor's Golf is an up and coming challenger brand in the golf at the leisure space. They've been absolutely crushing it over the past five years as a very rubbish golfer myself. I was super excited to get them on the podcast and also have this conversation, hence why I'm doing the show today, as opposed to Eric. So hopefully you can bear with me. This was just such an incredible conversation, honestly, like Alex and his team think about the way they create this brand or the way they're building this brand in just such an interesting way. They have this thesis of being the most creative and storytelling brand in the world when it comes to golf. If you check out what they're doing, you'll notice such high production values in every single piece of content they put out and really their thesis of being that most creative and storytelling led brand. They really have one. They've cut out such a cool niche in the market of golf and in a market, which is typically saturated by huge, big players like Calloway, Ping, TaylorMade, you know, all the like. So they've really been doing something interesting over there. We talk about everything from how they built, you know, a real ambassador community right from the time when they were really small and just starting out to now how they have like influences paying them to come to their events and post content for them. As opposed to the other way around and how they managed to reframe that typical brand influencer relationship. So that's something really interesting there. Then the other part of our conversation we really dive deep into actually what their creative sessions internally look like. He gives us a real insight into what the creative punch ups internally look like before they come up with all their great content and how they really think about, you know, what would be the six pieces of viral content we could do out of this one hook that we've got. So they really think about it from a social first lens, but also just like what's going to work what's going to be talkable and that's obviously something we know about as being one of the core tenants for challenger brands. And the final bit of the conversation we really speak about their collaborations with other brands. He has this great, great phrase of, you know, we fucking hate brands soup excuse my French, but that's exactly what it is. And, you know, he speaks about the fact that most challenger brands are start doing loads and loads of different collabs, but actually that might not be so valuable. So he breaks down his framework and how they ended up with this amazing collab that they did with Reebok. So without further ado, enjoy my conversation with Alex Ames of man is golf Alex, welcome to scratch. Hey, Veren, thank you. Excited to be here. Yeah, you're definitely not as excited as I am. I've been a big fan of man is golf for a very, very long time. I've been a very rubbish golfer for a very, very long time. So it's, you know, me too. So no worry about that. But yeah, I was super happy to get you guys on the show. And yeah, really grateful that as you I'm getting to host this, this one given that I've been such a fan of the brand and I just see the brand going from strength to strength. Every year since you guys have been born. And yeah, I think you've just done your biggest launch ever. And coincidentally, we're recording this on right a cup weekend, which is amazing for most golf fans if you're out there listening. So yeah, I'm very excited to have you on the show. I'm really excited to get into all the intricacies about man is golf and how you guys have built such a standout brand in the golf space. Well, thank you very much for having me. We're I'm excited to have this chat. It's it's not often that someone sort of happens on LinkedIn sometimes when when you've been working on something that you've you're in your own echo chamber and then someone sort of reflect back exactly what you've been trying to do and they really get the brand. And that's what you guys did. So it's really cool to hear that. And yeah, I love the podcast. So thanks for having me. Awesome. Well, cool. Alex, the one question that we ask every single guest before we get started and starting talking about their own brand is what's one challenger brand that you're passionate about right now, they can't be your own. I think someone who is doing it so well in a similar space to us and they've been a bit of a beacon for us in terms of laying down a playbook and we've borrowed some some really we just admire them is satisfy running. And who are based in France and we actually we work with one of their creatives who's been involved for the brand for a very long time and running in golf were going through similar changes and and updating and a bit of disruption. And so it was cool to it's just cool to have them as a as a yardstick for like really best in class for brand and we admire them a lot. So huge fan of the satisfy running. There's such a great brand, honestly, I think this is a second shout out that they've had on scratch, funnily enough, and the first one was with the founder, Ben Amana of box raw, the startup boxing brand. So based our Coventry, they're kind of taking over the boxing space, but he also noted satisfy running as like the very book and like the people who are doing it correctly. So yeah, we definitely want to get them on the show at some point, but yeah, I love everything that they do not there. Okay, so Alex, can you now give us a very quick overview of what manners actually does for those that don't know. Yeah, sure. So manners is a golf apparel business. So primarily performance wear for golf. If you can imagine, I mean, probably the easiest way to see it when we say it in shorthand is and this applies from a brand perspective, but also from a functionality and clothing and practical perspective is imagine like a like an arc terics or a north face for golf. So combining that kind of aspirational lifestyle, cultural feel of a passion hobby, that's kind of on the brand side, but then with the functionality performance wear a little bit of lifestyle in there because it is a really important part of people's lives. Something they feel passionate about golf or, you know, in the example, I use climbing or sort of outdoor sports and and yeah, so so it's performance wear kind of meets lifestyle. Yeah, that's awesome. I feel like you've probably undersold that a little bit because I definitely think I I understand it, at least as you know playing golf and no playing golf very well. But like I think I understood it very much as a like the first true lifestyle brand that I could see. I think there was a couple of others early doors when I first started getting into golf, which was like, you know, sort of a random golf club by Eric and and is laying in like the stuff that they're doing. And I felt like manners was, you know, homegrown and and really paired that lifestyle element of it with the amazing content that you guys are more definitely going to get into the content how you come up with it and all the creative stuff. But one interesting thing I've clearly seen and we spoke about in the prep call was like, you know, you're not just trying to be another lifestyle golf brand. You know, you've described that positioning as you know, you're kind of like the North Face or Arcterics for golf. But where how did you guys come up with that position? Because I was quite an interesting position to come up with. Well, perhaps I take your first question a bit too literally. So what we do is performance wearing golf, but we're very much a brand first business. We put a huge huge amount of stock into brand, something that's really important in fashion and the space that we're in. So if you want if you wanted to get a little bit more into the soft factors of it, which is probably the more fun part. Manners has this idea that golf is not a sport to be mastered, but a game to be explored. That's kind of our foundational belief. If you want to use that kind of brown brand terminology. And I think if you looked at the golf space over the last 20, 30 years, it was dominated by big brands. And it got quite stiff. I think as a sport, it had got quite stiff. It's an expensive sport. So it's also a sport that people can play until they're very old and the money stacks the sort of spending power stacks up with age. So it was, you know, it was geared towards an older demographic. And it was also geared towards the pro game. Those were kind of the two things going on. So you had either you had it was very stuffy or it had become like elite performance. And it was about, you know, how far do I hit this drive? 330 yards. It was really bright, garish polos, tightly hugging the biceps. And it was just, to be honest, like it was a brand that wasn't, it was a, sorry, it was a, it was a landscape that wasn't really resonating with a lot of us in the team, particularly with our co-founders Jojo and Luke when they started the business. And how we landed on this golf as a game to be explored. I actually handled the rebrand before I went to manners. So I was at an agency and manners came to our agency and we handled that branding process. And basically every golfer, whether you're a 20 handicap or you're a scratch handicap knows the feeling of going to a new place and being super excited to play a new golf course. It's got that same thing, the fishing or climbing or cycling has where it's like the adventure and the seeing the new track or mountain or river. It's absolutely intrinsic to the sport. It's like the golf course is this very special thing. We also have this thing in golf where it's like, you know, if I like football and I'm a ship footballer, I don't necessarily get to play an old traffic. But as a golfer, I can go and play at St Andrews, you know, I can go and play the old course. So you have this thing which is like the journey is one of the most amazing things in golf. And that was a feeling that we could see in the culture, social media, you know, just anecdotally the way we felt about the game. And it wasn't being reflected in the brands that we could see in the market. And I think the other interesting thing about that is it was it was across a very wide spectrum of golfers. And so I felt like a lot of golfers were being ignored and a lot of new golfers were being ignored the higher handicapers and the people who don't necessarily care about shooting scratch on the weekend. It's about enjoying it, having a beer with your friends afterwards. You can be super up for winning and be competitive, all that stuff. But there's there's so much more to golf than just that scorecard. And that kind of became another belief in the virus. It's it's about we said it's about the scorecard, not the score. So it's like, where did you play that's on your scorecard. But the score that you write down is really important. That's really interesting. I'm really interested as to how you pulled that insight out in terms of like golf is a game to be explored. And the reason I asked this is actually because this is a little bit of a winding story, but I'm going to tell it anyway, because I think this this will frame up my question properly. This past summer, so just like about a month ago, I was in Maui for my honeymoon. And my now wife, she's never played golf before. Never really been interested in it. She's like, whatever, go and play with your friends. I'm not really interested in this. But obviously a Maui, there's some amazing golf courses. And when we were staying, I was like, oh, the golf course looks amazing. I'd love to get out there. And she was like, just like, let's go. I'll drive the car. Let's go. I was like, you're going to have such a bad time, but fine. If you're saying yes, we'll do it together. We went and she actually loved it. And actually the exploration of being on this new course and like understanding the history of this course and just seeing the views and all this stuff. Yeah, she felt like a proper day out. So much so that she's now come back. We've come back to London. She signed herself up for golf lessons. And she's gone awfully into golf. It's insane. But actually this element of like feeling like it's an exploration. It's something which I've never thought about as like a as an in road into golf. But actually that's why I'm really curious to understand how you guys stumbled upon that insight. That's such an interesting one. It's interesting. So Luke Davies, who is our fantastic and very visionary, very smart creative director. He founded the brand. He's of him friends with him for a very long time, which is why I ended up with the branding project. He came to us knowing there is an explorer archetype here that is untapped in golf. And I think that he I think he always felt there was an opportunity to tell a different story. I just think he was really clear that like all the notes in golf are not being played like if you're thinking about a keyboard has 88 keys, something like that. But you know golf was being played right at one end all the keys were being hit was like 20 keys and there's just like there's this whole different different space to play in and it just wasn't being done. And I think you know there's still there's still a massive space for those keys that originally being played that's the that's still the primary part of golf that there was just so much being missed. So Luke actually came with us and said I know that there is a feeling here that we're not quite we're not quite leveraging that we're not quite looking at as as golf brands and as an industry. So it was our job to go and do the research you know we looked by the way I worked for an agency called Sunder and tell fantastic agency strategy agency in London. And we would do so much quantitative research so it wasn't about like you know we weren't pouring through market research or anything like that we were we were looking at golf top 100. And I'm a golf nerd so I knew the space already and I knew that that archetype was very much real so it was about finding inspiration there's the literature on golf exploration is absolutely endless and yet there was no brand tapping into that like it. I love to say that we stumbled across this this amazing inside but it was all there like I think it's Bernard Darwin is an old writer from like the 40s who wrote a book about great courses big and small in England. There's golfers journal in the US who does an incredible job they were already running they had that kind of surfer outdoor vibe but applied to golf so there was stuff going on in the zeitgeist and it's been around for long enough. For us it was a surprise and it wasn't being done well already and so we leaned into it and I think you've seen the whole golf space has shifted that way since I think manners is in a big way responsible for that. I think we've ended up on a sound like a bit of a knob here but we've wound up on a lot of mood boards for other brands and I think the whole space is kind of shifting towards that enjoyment of the game that kind of thing I think covid also helped but it was all there already I'd love to say we came up with it but it was all there. Well that's part of it isn't it like I think great insights especially when it comes to challenger brands and building in a legacy category oftentimes it is kind of looking at what's already there and just reframing it and understanding that actually this is existed but people haven't looked at it through this lens or whatever it is I think that's that's quite an important way of looking at things. Yeah I would also say that if you think about how golf was being marketed it was being marketed through pros and it was being marketed at pro shops so on trade and you have to look at that distribution and think like okay. One of them was for the super athletes who are really into golf and then the other ones were for the sort of you know country club elite style and that was the two types of branding that you had in golf and so it made sense and what happened in recent years and especially during covid was social media. So people then got to add their own interpretation to everything and so much of it was the beauty the just like being able to show look at where I am with your iPhone and I think that really changed the culture and blasted it open for a lot of younger golfers definitely and we're going to get into that like your social media stuff in the next chapter but whilst we're here I wanted to talk about obviously your. One of the key things that we've seen challenger brands do really well especially when they're coming into an incumbent category where there's a lot of like a lot of original players already in the space we see that they'll lean very very heavily into like sort of paid media and just like trying to dominate the market through like. Yeah I just want to say paid media strategies more than anything else but with your background and obviously content storytelling you are you did stuff for Arsenal before for Taikoia before and also loops like creator vision was sort of unique creative philosophies did you bring into man is and why was storytelling so important for you guys right at the beginning. I'd love to take credit for for having this genius strategy of creative but the reality was like we came from a background of film and and Luke was a director I had worked in production and agency. And when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail so I would have was our that was our background we wanted to make interesting content and films and tell stories and I had a writing background as well we did a lot writing about golf and it was you know part passion part because it was just all you had to do. We did have this interesting inflection point where we launched the brand and it went really well the launch and we were only we only had enough budget to launch two collections year that point to it a spring summer and an autumn winter and we sort of book end summer and we launched a spring summer for the new collection is like this big rebrand is super exciting and went really well. A month goes past starts to go a little bit worse like Shopify sales are dipping and we're like you know this is not a lot going on there's not a lot of traction. Another month goes by it's it's just like falling off a cliff now bear mine none of us have a real background in like marketing marketing so we don't really know about awareness and impressions and all that stuff we're kind of making up as we go along. And we started calling this time now looking back at it we call it the dark ages because at this point we had so little money that if we didn't get something going we could be our business in six months. And and then we threw this event we just it was a bit of a hail Mary we know like we had a pretty good network in London so we managed to get some cricketers and footballers like some an interesting crowd just 32 people to an event in London in the middle of summer. Did some story telling around it did some social media around it and also we had the influence a work of people just going like man is doing this call event and overnight we saw sales pick up and so we're just like okay we're just not doing enough we're not like turning up in enough places we're not telling enough stories we're not throwing enough events we're not engaging with people enough. So we went from we just had this kind of penny drop moment and it we needed a lot of work to go before we got to our event for strategy but so much of it was just like how do you show up so regularly one way was events that was the first clue but we realize like you just need people's attention if you're if you're releasing a collection twice a year. It's essentially two weeks a year where you have a reason to talk about something and so we just needed to create so many reasons to talk about manners and so we started thinking and Luke actually went away and did this whole strategic breakdown of like how are we going to how are you going to earn attention and how are you going to make attention the like foundational currency of our business so storytelling getting people to want to spend their attention with manners. And with manners is going to be like absolutely fundamental to the point where it's it takes priority over the product it's like we have an amazing product team and our product super premium and you know we don't make huge margins because we make sure that we pass the value to the customer. However, that's not our unfair advantage it's so hard to make clothes fashion that like really stands out so it's like how do you build a brand that makes people super passionate about you I mean Gucci can put Gucci on a white t shirt and sell it for a 10 times more than unit clothes so it's like everyone knows this is intrinsically true like brand is so important in fashion. And so it was like how do we tell the most compelling story how do we get the most attention how do we make people really passionate about manners and that's how we started rolling into our organic content strategy which we can get into the nitty gritty of unsure. Marketing can feel lonely at the top unless you're in the right room that's what rival amp is a global community built for senior marketers and brand leaders inside our private WhatsApp group you'll find unfiltered conversations sharp insights and bold ideas you won't see on LinkedIn. Straight from some of the brightest minds in marketing it's exclusive its application only and it's designed for challenger marketers who want to push boundaries together. Apply now at wearrival.com and join the marketers rewriting the rules. Let's definitely do that but before we jump into that section because I have like 50 questions in that section about your career process and everything but I did want to quickly touch on the event strategy because I think that's a really interesting one. I've been obviously quietly watching you guys from from afar and stalking everything you do on social media and I noticed that like even for your events you're kind of to your to your earlier point you're not really focused on the pros or even the golfers who have like. At least from my angle like massive following like golf creators who have massive following like the event you did last week I think at Brock at Hall I was like clicking through some of the golf profiles that were there like an invite to the event and I was like these are just like every day people with a few thousand followers like that I feel like I could play with some of them. There's like a lot of other brands. I'm definitely taking up on that but like I feel like a lot of the other brands like they're leaning into like where who has the biggest following in that that's the person we're going to invite to play the the course before the right of couple whatever it is you know. Sure so there it feels like there's a distinctly different position you've taken on events so can you talk to me just a little bit about what that stress years were events. Yeah I would say that the first time we did it and it was 32 of us and that's the all we could afford we paid for everyone to play at a really nice golf course and it was all influences and it was really nice and they like you know they taught us a lot and we and they did a lot for us because they posted about the brand it's super cool for like the authority of manners when we were tiny. But as we've got bigger we've realized that like so much of it and a hugely important part of building a brand is having people who really really believe in what you do and who you are. And not really from a marketing perspective as you say like these people don't have a huge following it's not going to like not want to change our business. But you get feedback and you like you actually get to know your customers that there's so many people from that. Events that we had a couple weeks ago who I've known for three years now and they're just people who bought manners when it when it launched and I know you know I know them really really well I see them four or five times a year and they feel like they're an extension of the business. With regards to the two influences and how that next happens like at a certain point we started selling tickets for these events because they're expensive so we you know we may know profit on them but we just needed to try and if we wanted to throw them we had to had to charge. And so we just said like okay influences have to pay and if they want to come great but really this is for for us to engage with our customers. And you know Ashley Cole came to our event last week and paid you know whatever his his 80 pounds for a ticket and then you've got you know my mate Theo who's been there for three years who just like he just a lad who who we know who comes to the events because he loves it and. And he's in the same these having the same bacon and egg back in the morning is as Ashley Cole and and potentially like you know deck on rice or whatever and it's just is really cool that it's happening it's happened so organically and we sell a few tickets on I'll be honest like we sell let's say 40 50% of the tickets on our website they go in 10 minutes and then we we sell 50 where we go do you want to come to. And influence our ambassadors those people and we trip are we charge them for the ticket and they're happy to pay. And it's really cool because they're like I feel like as a result the relationship has become it's become more like a bit less like fanboy and corporate as like we you know they're not trying to they know we're a small business trying to make something happen they like the business. They support it by giving us 100 quid and turning up to our event and then posting about it even though the value they're providing is massive and it's so cool that they do that but they also don't they don't have to do it there's no pressure and I think they kind of like that it's like I'm helping out. That really reframes the whole like brand influence a partnership that you typically hear about we're like influencer is like pay me £10,000 although has nothing goes out. Yeah I would say that there's a I'm so hot on this actually and I want to write about it and post about it because I think it's so interesting I think that you get a he the most unspoken about. Value of brand is the discounting that you get is like influences will work with you for less and be excited to do it people will do stuff you know creatives really really good creatives who want to be involved in your creative process will approach the brand and be excited to work with us and like we can't afford the creatives that we work with. But they've been excited about the early work that we've done and they want to be a part of building that and so they've come on board and I'm really that all of that credit goes to to look our creative director is just an absolute genius at bringing a vision to life on screen and and in design and all those kind of things. Yeah I mean yeah this this kind of actually segues us really nicely into that next chapter that we had sort of laid out in the initial brief which is like. When we spoke about this in the prep call you had made this very clear statement that the thesis for manners is very much that creative and brand will win and because of that you've significantly outspent peers when it comes to content and just production value. I mean obviously now looking at it sort of what five five years in roughly it's it's easy to see like okay that was the right bet but was it just sheer like Luke forcing it through in the beginning which said okay this is the bet that we're going to take and like we're going to just have really high production value. I know you kind of mentioned the hammer and the nail analogy previously as well but just you know I think that there's a really interesting question in that in the sense that a lot of challenger brands when they start up their face with yeah not a lot of money and they have to make a big impact and sometimes taking that decision is pretty tough so I'm just interested to understand a bit more about the thought process when going into that. Yeah so that as I said we spent a lot of money early making sure that everything was super premium and. The content was really good creators were really good photographers were really good. I people want photograph and golf in that way yet like I honestly think we were quite ahead of the curve in the way that we positioned ourselves in the way we made everything look now what's interesting is that no one really saw it because we spend no money on paid social getting out there we had no budget for. And yeah we had no budget for paid social and we weren't even using iPhone stuff yet and we can guarantee that in a minute but like we were so keen on it being premium that we refused to use iPhone to shoot anything so we basically had like a suite of amazing assets that weren't geared up for going viral they weren't. Now many of them but it looked really really good and I think the first people that took to manners were people who really appreciated that and were you know ultimately became super into the brand because they found something that wasn't big that looked amazing and they carried it and I would say that like a lot of those people were. Influential people so like key opinion leaders and influences and those people particularly in the era of creatives can now carry a brand and so there's a value in making sure the thing that is you know they're like the assets and. The stuff that is so close to the brand is so so so strong and we overspend on it but I would say that is more through ignorance than anything else it would eventually become strategy and and yeah it evolved and it we also became a bit more relaxed about what went out on our socials and using iPhone and all that kind of stuff but at the beginning. It was ignorance and then we shout ourselves because we weren't getting enough awareness and it was only the it was kind of like the influences who picked us up who were keen to come to the event because they saw how cool the assets were. It was like a bit of luck that there were enough people around who saw it and thought this is really cool i'm going to shout about it. And actually then let's get into more of the actual process because you know it's one thing putting something beautiful out but concepting that stuff like I've worked in video production for the past 10 years like I know how difficult it is to come up with creative ideas and that's one of the key things I really wanted to understand from man is because obviously you guys have created some of the most watchable content on golf internet to be honest. I mean I'm going to shout out a couple of my favourites like the the locking at the local club until James I thought that was just amazing like it was just a really really great piece of content and then also the most recent one which I just watched yesterday was like the nine holes at sunrise video. And yeah those are both James yeah I would James I would highly highly recommend people go and watch those even if you're not into golf I would recommend you watch the nine holes at sunrise video. The reason is because I found myself sort of what 15 minutes into that video or something or like nine minutes into that video and I was like oh there's not a single line of dialogue in this video but I've been watching it without like being distracted by my phone or anything else. And that just goes to because this show like a great creative concept with that high production value can really can really hit even in you know the tech talk generation that we live in today. But Alex the question that I wanted to ask you on the back of that is you know what does that internal process look like inside of manners for creative development you're all obviously very creative all have backgrounds and storytelling. Can you kind of unpack that sort of you know creative punch up sessions if you were and how those kind of then feed into everything. Yeah I mean we took a long time to get there but we got quite obsessed with what we call the pipeline and the process and we're on notion which is an amazing software which where you can just like dump ideas down and and have all this stuff tracked and. Yeah I mean we were so far away from this at the beginning like it was an absolutely mess at the beginning it was basically us just sat around going what we should do. And we'd kind of pick something and be excited about and Luke is like an ideas factory as well so you know he was always jumping on something that he was excited to do basically. But in recent years in sort of the last year really we have two meetings we have a Monday meeting and a Thursday meeting and now on the Monday meeting we have. You know wins of the week losses of the week why did it work why didn't it work so the feedback is unbelievable and that has been a tremendous differences like once we've introduced positive and negative feedback about why things work and we're absolutely forensic about. Why did this hook work why didn't it work what we do better next time we haven't got to the stage where we've started re editing old videos to see if they'll work again just because we produce so much content that we we don't even need to but in the future I think we'll get into that stage where it's like okay why didn't this work how do we make it better. We have all the stats so we're like we're pretty good with numbers now we know how many impressions we need to get on our organic socials in order to get enough people on our website in order to get enough people to purchase to hit our revenue target. And so we have targets weekly and we know if we've made or missed them and we have this on YouTube LinkedIn Instagram TikTok Twitter we're not very good at but we you know there's goals to get better at it so like the the Monday meeting is not really a creative meeting it's like a forensics meeting and it's like what are we doing next. And then the Thursday meeting is this is a new thing but it's working very very well it's just a punch up so it's you know it's a battle of ideas and it's you come with we've got a folder which is all the different references of stuff that we like from all across the internet from you know whatever boxing running from beauty brands anything we like. And so how would we apply this to golf why has this worked is all the most viral stuff on the internet why is it worth why is the format work how could we create this for manners this that's more like our. That's always on like social content which is super important for the campaign stuff by the way we have a campaign review which is also similar it's like how did the roll out work why did it work what didn't work what piece like we're just we're quite intense now if you think we spend about three hours a week deciding why things did and didn't work and why the next thing will over the course of three years you get pretty good. At at knowing what works and what doesn't and with campaign stuff that's a little we'll have someone assigned to the campaign so we'll have James is running so and so campaign aid and is running the rider cup campaign Luke and I will handle the bigger campaigns and honestly for the I'll just use an example for the foul with a collection it was. We knew we had this opportunity to go to Iceland we knew that islam was this really was a really cool place for golf and it had this unique thing which is. It you can only play in the summer and we just went away and thought about it and both of us came in and had a sort of two man punch up like you know everyone speaks about the the fair where the golfer like we all know who that is we all know the fair where the golfer and everyone's heard that term who plays golf but no one's ever really thought about their counterpart or their antithesis and there's this really dramatic thing of like the summer is going that you are going to lose the. You are going to lose the summer in Iceland and they love golf so much but it's like it's gone you're not going to be able to play for the whole winter and so we wanted to hero and honestly at the beginning we had the idea was like it was nowhere close to the foul at a collection. Partly and this is stupid but it's true we were excited about the fact that there's been loads of Game of Thrones film in Iceland so this was there was this whole like rich world of like North mythology and you can see that in the typography of the collection and stuff so. For these ones it's like we go away and we look at all the different inputs and how they cross over and I wear how does it apply to golfers and I would say with the campaigns it's a little bit less scientific and process driven and it's a little bit more what's a what's a fucking cool story that hasn't been told in golf like why why is this going to be relevant to golfers. We often start with location although we're trying to get away from that it's more like I'd say something that's interesting is the fact that every other golf brand is basically trying to say this is going to make you better and we don't have to say that but we're never trying to say that so all we're trying to do is how do we entertain golfers like what is a story that isn't being told right now. And it's just a way more it's a way broader way more exciting place to play and then these clothes are going to make you shoot scratch or whatever. So there's two parts there's one there's the like forensic analysis of how to make things go viral but the idea part it's hard to like I have to admit it's it's a little less process driven it's a little bit more let's get in a room let's brainstorm let's punch up. You did mention one of the really interesting things that you mentioned in the prep call was like this idea of coming up with sort of 10 hooks when you're when you're coming up with a creative idea can you talk to us a little bit about that. Yeah so once we have like a kernel of an idea we got this from max fascia is a youtuber who we know in Britain and he's like he won't make a YouTube video unless he knows the thumbnail and the title is like he's starting from what's going to go viral and grab attention and we're not quite as cold as that but it's an interesting thought experiments like. If you have a campaign idea which is the foul letter collection what are the the six viral pieces of content what are the things that like they're a representation of that idea but they're surreal they're captivating they are. So over the top that people are not going to be able to look away and they're 15 20 seconds long I'll give you a good example so actually if you park the foul with a collection for a second and think about our Reebok manners campaign. We came up with this idea which was based blue came up with this idea which is based on the fact that we're both British brands and in Britain you walk the golf course. It's intrinsic to manners because it's about a game to be explored like we believe in we don't we don't we don't do golf carts in manners as much like we think it's an outdoor sport it's exercise. And so that's and it's British to walk the course so that's important to us is a shoe collection so made sense with the whole walking theme and so no thanks I'll walk became the caption the tagline the campaign message and it was also an ice idea because it has that kind of polite Britishness which is also a bit of a backhanded insult which is very British and. The thinking of the viral idea for that is what's the most dramatic way to represent the fact that i'm just going to walk the golf course today and we settled on let's blow up a golf car and at one point before we were thinking about budgets but when we were just in the like screw it let's let's make this as viral as possible. We had the idea to have a crane with the manners logo on a wrecking ball and just have the wrecking ball go past the golf cart like three times so everyone on social media it's like oh you're just waiting for the for the golf car to get obliterated. And as we think and are probably our. To our Monday and Thursday sessions of figuring out what works what doesn't work what goes viral what works on the internet has informed the way we bring our campaigns to life because we have ideas the foul weather collection no thanks i'll walk with rebok but then we go okay. What do we know about social media that where we know what's the dramatic version of this idea that takes it to the nth degree that is just going to go viral on social media let's blow up a golf car let's you know let's put a wrecking ball through a golf car for the foul weather collection it was let's climb a mountain with four golfers it was. Let's have a guy chipping to a green but instead of chipping a bucket of balls he's chip 10 thousand 30 thousand golf balls and we actually went and got 30 thousand golf balls so it's like. You see what I mean it's like we learn about the virality of social we come up with campaign ideas the same way that we always would have for agencies or or anything in our past but now we use what we know about social media to go how do we make this go viral. We love that prompt of like what's the most dramatic version of this and I think that's something that's a us here at rival and specifically the rival media team which our own is like one of our mandates has like come up with something ridiculous to do every single month and yeah Eric has been like great with that because he's always push like what's the what's the rival did a thing thing that we're doing this month and it's really bloody hard to come up with like cool ideas but I really love that prompt of like what's the most dramatic thing and I'm thinking. And I'm thinking about it in the context of of two things one we're about to launch like the rival 50 which is like our first time launching this annual list of like the best challenger brands in the world the top 50 challenger brands in the world we're going to launch our website on November the 11th actually so a little shout out to that but we're thinking about like what is the campaign around now like what's the most dramatic thing we can do to launch that so that's definitely going to be something I take away to our team next week and speak to them about but the other piece of that puzzle is like as we've been building that list we've been building like like a scoring system for all these brands like to understand what makes a brand like in the top 50 or number one when we when we score them and actually one of the key differentiate one of the key pillars that we're scoring them against is this idea of talkability and actually being able to come up with content and ideas and things that are talkable that get people you know passing around sharing it and talking about it continuously so it really outlives just that moment when you post it. And that's a really interesting interesting thing that you guys have done well. What does the future of the CMO really look like? Does the role still belong in the C suite or is it about to be replaced by AI? And if you're just a creative should you be worried about your job in the future of the CMO documentary presented by rival Eric talks with leaders from MasterCard, Shell, Dr. Shals and more to unpack what tomorrow's marketing leaders need to know today. Together they explore the future of the role what will be expected and what you need to know to stay relevant as a marketing professional. So what does the future of the CMO actually look like? Watch the full documentary through the link in the show notes and now back to the episode. You know what's so interesting is we we follow the founder of Instagram everyone should by the way like any branch should follow him he's just constantly telling you how to win Instagram and he's absolutely obviously right. And he said the thing that they value the most in the algorithm is people hitting the share button to send to friends and direct direct message stuff to their friends. So if you can bring an idea to life that people want to take ownership of that they say I saw this first I think it's cool and I'm going to show everyone else. I'm going to sort of claim it as my own because I think it's cool and it's going to be a cool representation of things that I like. So you're going to send it to 10 friends because they liked it is like you're digitalizing that talk ability feature you're digitalizing the the like word of mouth marketing and it just self propagates and then like. The virality of social now and Instagram say if you can crack that you don't need to spend on you don't need to give your money to to Facebook and Google. So true. All right. So Alex in the last segment of our brief in our conversation I did want to kind of touch back on something you mentioned a little bit earlier, which was the Reebok collaboration like that was clearly a standout moment. Such an epic brand Reebok is a is a client of ours on the agency side of the business so we know good people that are there. And we know what they're trying to do to reinvent that brand as well. So I thought it was just such a cool partnership for man is to do now one of the key things that stood out for me in our prep call was something when when I asked you like why did you guys choose Reebok your first response was in our quote we fucking hate brand soup. And I really like that so talk to me about that and like you know how have you built this very strong internal filter or framework for evaluating you know where you should partner and who which brands you should partner with. I actually heard that phrase from someone at a one of the major brands in the world. I won't say it is because we're going to have a partnership next year with them has been released here. But they said to us we really like you guys because it doesn't feel like you do brand soup and we were like hell yeah like that we don't do brand so we don't want to do and so. And we they shouldn't really explain what it was but we knew exactly what it was it's there is there's a really fine line right like we're a business we want to we are trying to to hit target to make revenue and you know that that's a huge part of what we do it's not just creative. But equally it feels like more and more of particularly in fashion but in every industry there's just like a land grab words like there's so much so much done and so much of it feels like a map hazard and a not thought out and particularly in fashion when you talk about collaborations you know the original collaborations were so novel and interesting unique and they were they were really authentic and and two brands came together and they found like what's the crossover where's the tension what's going to be an interesting story to tell based on the crossover of these two brands. But people have obviously figured out that like oh creating a novel moment is easy you just put to brand logos together and you share audiences and in a sense that's true that you do share audiences there's there's something in the functionality of just like our audience plus your audience equals lots of sales and lots of people are doing that. We really want to avoid that and we said no to so many collaborations prior to re-bock because it didn't feel right and there wasn't a good reason to do it and when re-bock came to us there's a guy called movie chat out movies awesome and he basically said like we love what you're doing and we're a British brand we're getting back into golf in a big way he showed us the original pumps which is an old re-bock shoe he showed us like the heritage with John daily he'd obviously really thought about like the re-bock archive the the streetwear heritage and the Britishness of it all and he really got what manners were doing and it just felt like he was taking it seriously as a creative project not as by man as a cool let's do something together because we want to cash in on that and so it just set a really nice foundation for let's go away and figure out how these brands actually interact and crossover and what's the cool tension and where's it going to work and it's born out in the product like that campaign was so exciting and such pivotal moment for us and as we mentioned we got to blow up a golf car and that has the opportunity you know a lot of people drive golf carts that had the chance to piss off a lot of golfers and you know majority of golfers in the US which I imagine is a re-bock's biggest market and they were like yeah cool do it and yeah I think the fact that they didn't want to be brand suit they didn't want to just slap two logos together they're willing to take few risks it just made all the difference to to make that campaign really strong and I take it that's kind of the guiding light when you do look at collaborations like how far can we go are they going to let us be creative and do they align from a value standpoint totally and so much of it is just how excited are they to do something interesting and it's quite a nice position to be in now because we've done a really good one we can take these calls and say I'm quite proud of us that we didn't jump on things before this when we did need the money we were quite disciplined and we're not going to do this because it's not us and now we've got a lot of options and we get to choose these guys are really excited about doing something really really cool and they're going to let us cook and they're going to be excited to do it with us and they're going to support us in all the ways that a big brand can it just makes a huge huge difference awesome great well Alex if you have time I'd love to do a quick quick lightning round if that's okay with you and the conversation yeah awesome great so switching gears a little bit now if your brand were a pizza what type of pizza would it be I don't eat pizza what I would say just because it's the best pizza I would say wide din crust I think you're probably dipping some garlic sauce you're channeling my slightly overweight co-founder Luke for no brand reasons okay what's the best campaign you've seen recently I love absolutely love the new KFC campaign where they it's the tagline is believe in chicken and it's a whole ceremony where they are taking it's like clearly like some sort of cult in the jungle and they take a guy from the tribe and they dip him into the river and he comes out as a chicken nugget and there's a giant gold egg and it's just like it's nonsense but it is so captivating and hilarious and it's like the whole message is like you know you should be spiritually in love with KFC because it is so good and I just thought it was hilarious that is actually a great campaign we'll definitely link it in the show notes what's the most underrated channel for challenger brands today? LinkedIn okay everyone knows about TikTok everyone knows about Instagram LinkedIn is hard to track it's it's really manual so you can't do like you have to rely on your employees because it's employee led but if you have a creative team you can repurpose every single piece of content that you've done and tell people why you've done it and it's just as organically impactful and potential to go viral as maybe not as TikTok but yeah it can go viral and then the other thing I would say is so interesting it's like we've done partnerships with PGA Tour, BMW, the RNA we've got some big ones coming next year which is super exciting we've done some massive massive golf partnerships and they've all come from LinkedIn so you don't sleep on it it's so so good and if you have a great brand it'll do great on LinkedIn and opportunities will come from their big opportunities great and final one if your brand had a storefront what would you put in the window? I would like to have a storefront I don't know what we put in the window but we've actually done a concept for the store this idea of like half of it would be a coffee shop I mean I know that's not particularly exciting these days to have a coffee shop in a retail space but I think the exciting thing about it is you would have half of it as a clubhouse and you would go through a door and then you would feel like you're on a golf course so you'd try and have my installations where there's plants and it would feel very outdoorsy kind of yeah, arcterics vibe but then golf has that interesting duality words that you have the cozy warm premium richness of a clubhouse and then you go through to the like links golf course that would be very cool when you open that let me know I'll be the first customer in the door we're desperate to do it awesome well that's all I have today Alex thank you so much that was an incredible conversation I've learnt a lot for myself but I'm sure the audience have picked up a lot as well there I will make sure that we link everything we've spoken about in the show notes here but thank you again for your time Thanks mate, it's good to chat with you very much and as I said it's we still feel like a very small challenger brand and so when anyone takes notice especially someone like you guys it's really encouraging for us and we really appreciate it and we were just the fact that some big voices are saying back to us what we think we're trying to do it's very validating so thank you keep doing it and look forward to seeing the growth with manners take care Cheers friend Scratch is a production of rival we are a growth consultancy that builds challenger brands, strategies, and capabilities to disrupt categories if you want to learn more about us check out weareival.com if you want to connect with me email me at [email protected] or find me on LinkedIn if you enjoyed today's show please subscribe share with anyone you think might enjoy it and leave us a review thanks for listening and see you next week [BLANK_AUDIO]