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Erik: What did working on a PGA tour teach you about the importance of events in marketing
strategy?
I was with the PGA tour, the Champion’s Tour to be specific which formally was the
Senior Tour, had an opportunity to manage and direct an event down in Dorado, Puerto
Rico about forty five minutes outside of San Juan. This is an island community who has
no idea how an event could be utilized to benefit their own community, the island itself.
So having been down there a couple of years, what we developed was a relationship with
a charity any event is even that much better once it’s tied to a charity, so there was
a charity down on the south side of the island called Sister Sor Isolina Ferre, Sister Sor
Isolina Ferre was Puerto Rico’s equivalent to Mother Theresa, a saintly woman who did
wonderful things for the entire island of Puerto Rico over the years, she passed away
but they developed a school and an entire foundation behind her. So in working with
the PGA tour having seen through the years how many of the tournaments in the United
States were making a ton of money for charities like Saint Jude for example we tied our plan
to a similar model that FedEx and the Saint Jude event in Memphis was using and so we
were bringing in not a ton of sponsors but the right sponsors who wanted to be tied to
charity, so whenever we would approach up and coming companies at that time like Maui
Jim Sunglasses, Tommy Bahama, established companies such as Hyatt and Chrysler, Delta,
Pepsi, those were our heavy hitters, each of them wanted to be involved with a tournament
like ours because of that community and charity involvement and the ability to raise funds
that would then help the impoverished and the lesser than fortunate down in Puerto Rico.
Our event was called the Chrysler Senior Match Play Challenge what we did was we took the
top sixteen money winners on the Champion’s Tour and put them in a match play format so
that it wasn’t a standard four day weekend tournament on national TV, we put each of
those matches, sixteen total matches, in two hour episodes on ESPN in and around the time
between Thanksgiving and the Christmas and winter holidays so then whenever you would
approach a potential sponsor to offer them value you’re talking thirty two total hours
of coverage on ESPN during primetime when you’re sitting around eating turkey and
celebrating the holidays with your family if you so chose to watch golf and realizing
that senior golf wasn’t necessarily the most appealing but with a backdrop like the
Caribbean and Puerto Rico, you’re talking pretty neat situation. So that being said
it was easy to go to the likes of Hyatt and Chrysler and Tommy Bahama and have them contribute
the wonderful monies that they did that ultimately trickled down to Sister Sor Isolina Ferre
and various charities we were working with in Puerto Rico.