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

0:00We'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 to if you wanted to get a little bit more into the soft factors of it which is probably the more fun part um 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 uh this is going to make you better and we don't have to say that like 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 fulweiler and this is scratch bringing you marketing lessons from the leading brands and brains rewriting the rule book from scratch for the world of today Hey everyone, it's Viren here.

1:04I am the executive producer of Scratch and of Rival Media. You typically don't hear my voice and yes, you are missing the sultry tones of Eric Fulwiler this week. I've stepped in to host this very special episode of Scratch with Alex Ames of Manors Golf. So Manors Golf is an up-and-coming challenger brand in the golf athleisure space. they've been absolutely crushing it over the past five years as a very rubbish goal for 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 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 won they've cut out such a cool niche in the market of golf and in a market which is you know typically saturated by huge big players like Callaway, Ping, TaylorMade you know all the like so they've really been doing something interesting over there.

2:34We 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 influencers paying them to come to their events and post content for them as opposed to the other the 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 brand soup excuse my french but that's exactly what it is and you know he speaks about the fact that most challenger brands will 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 Manors Golf.

4:07Alex welcome to Scratch. hey bern thank you excited to be here yeah uh you're definitely not as excited as i am i've been a big fan of manners golf for a very very long time um i've been a very rubbish golfer for a very long time so as you know well me too so don't worry about that but yeah i was super happy to get you guys on on the show and yeah really grateful that as 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 um and yeah i think you've just done your biggest launch ever uh and coincidentally we're recording this on rider cup weekend which is amazing for most golf fans if you're out there listening um so yeah i'm very excited to have you on the show i'm really excited to get into all the intricacies about manners golf and how you guys have built such a standout brand in the golf space well thank you very much for for having me we're um I'm excited to have this chat.

5:09It's not often that someone sort of happens on LinkedIn sometimes when you've been working on something, but you're in your own echo chamber and then someone sort of reflects 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 started talking about their own brand is what's one challenger brand that you're passionate about right now and it 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 a beacon for us in terms of laying down a playbook and we've borrowed some um some really we just admire them uh is satisfy running um who are based in france and we actually we work with one of their creatives um who's been involved with the brand for a very long time uh and running in golf we're going through similar changes and and updating and a bit of disruption um 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 satisfy running they're such a great brand honestly i think this is a second shout out that they've had on scratch funnily enough um the first one was with um the founder ben amana of box raw the startup boxing brand so based out of coventry um they're kind of taking over the boxing space but he also noted satisfy running as like the the very broken like the people who are doing it correctly so yeah we definitely want to get them on the show at some point um but yeah i love everything that they're doing out there um cool 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 um manners is a uh a golf apparel business so primarily performance wear for golf um 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 arcteryx or a north face for golf so combining that kind of aspirational lifestyle cultural feel of um a passion hobby that's kind of on the brand side but then with the functionality performance where a little bit of lifestyle in there because it is a really important part of people's lives something they feel passionate about golf um or you know in the example i use climbing or sort of outdoor sports um and and yeah so so it's performance where kind of meets uh lifestyle yeah that's awesome um 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 not 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 Anders Lang and like the stuff that they're doing um I felt like Manners was you know homegrown and and really paired that lifestyle element of it with the amazing content that you guys do and we're 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 arcteryx for golf but how did you guys come up with that position because that's quite an interesting position to come up with.

9:29Well, perhaps I take your first question a bit too literally. So what we do is performance wear and 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 wanted to get a little bit more into the soft factors of it which is probably the more fun part um manners has this idea that uh golf is not a sport to be mastered but a game to be explored that's kind of our foundational belief um 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 um and it got quite stiff i think as a sport it had got quite stiff it's an expensive sport so and 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 um 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 was 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 um and how we landed on this golf as a game to be explored uh 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 um and basically every golfer um 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 that 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 shit footballer i don't necessarily get to play at old trafford but as a golfer i can go and play at St.

12:33Andrews. 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, 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 handicappers 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 vials it's 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 um but the score that you write down isn't really important that's a 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 ask 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 uh summer so just like about a month ago I was in Maui for my honeymoon um 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 in Maui there's some amazing golf courses and where we were staying I was like oh the golf course looks amazing I'd love to get out there um and she was like just like let's go I'll drive the car let's go I was like you're gonna have such a bad time but fine if you're 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 it actually 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 fully into golf loved it like it's it's insane but actually this element of like feeling like it's an exploration is something which i've i never thought about as like a as an inroad into golf but actually that's why i'm really curious to understand how you guys stumbled upon that insight like that's such an interesting one um it's interesting so luke davies who is our fantastic and very visionary, very smart creative director.

15:24He founded the brand. I've been 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. Like, you know, golf was being played right at one end. All the keys were being hit. It was like 20 keys. And there's this whole different space to play in, and it just wasn't being done.

16:20And I think there's still a massive space for those keys that were originally being played. That's still the primary part of golf, but 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 leveraging, that we're not quite looking at as golf brands and as an industry. And so then it was our job to go and do the research. You know, we looked, by the way, I worked for an agency called Sonder Intel, fantastic agency, strategy agency in London.

16:57And 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 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, I'd love to say that we stumbled across this amazing insight, 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.

17:47There's Golfer's 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 that 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 has existed but people haven't looked at it through this lens or whatever it is so i think that's that's quite an important way of looking at things yeah i would also say that um if you think about how golf was being marketed it was being marketed through pros and it was being marketed at pro shops so uh 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 uh the just like being able to show look at where i am with your iphone um 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 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 this 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 were you did stuff for arsenal before for tycoea before and also luke's like creative vision what sort of unique creative philosophies did you bring into manners and why was storytelling so important for you guys right at the beginning uh 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 So that was our background.

21:08We wanted to make interesting content and films and tell stories. And I had a writing background as well. We did a lot of writing about golf. And it was, you know, part passion, part because it was just all we knew how to do. We did have this interesting inflection point where we launched the brand. and it went really well the launch and we were we only had enough budget to launch two collections a year at that point so we had a spring summer and an autumn winter and we'd sort of bookend the summer and we launched our spring summer for the new collection it was like this big rebrand and it's 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 in mind 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 um 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 some footballers like some an interesting crowd just 32 people to an event in london in the middle of summer did some storytelling around it did some social media around it and also we had the influencer work of people just going like manners are doing this cool 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 off 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 we needed a lot of work to go before we got to our eventual 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 realized like you just need people's attention if you're if you're releasing a collection twice a year though 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 um and did this whole strategic breakdown of like how are we gonna how are we gonna earn attention and how are we gonna make attention the like foundational currency of our business so storytelling getting people to want to spend their attention 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's 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 10 times more than uniqlo so it's like everyone knows this is intrinsically true.

25:05Like 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, I'm sure. Marketing can feel lonely at the top unless you're in the right room. That's what Rivalamp 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.

25:42Straight from some of the brightest minds in marketing. It's exclusive. It's application only. And it's designed for challenger marketers who want to push boundaries together. Apply now at wearerival.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 followings like golf creators who have massive followings like the event you did last week I think at Brockett Hall I was like clicking through some of the golf profiles that were there like and invited to the event and I was like these are just like everyday people with a few thousand followers like that I feel like I could play with some of them um whereas like a lot of other brands I mean I'll definitely take you up on that but like I feel like a lot of the other brands like they're leaning into like oh where who has the biggest following and that the that's the person we're going to invite to play the the course before the Ryder Cup or whatever it is you know um sure so 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 strategy is for 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 influencers 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 um 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 gonna like i'm gonna change our business um but you get feedback and you like you actually get to know your customers there's so many people from that event 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 um with regards to the to influences and how that mix happens like at a certain point we started selling tickets for these events because they're expensive so we you know we made no 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 um influencers have to pay and if they want 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's just like he's just a lad who who we know who comes to the events because he loves it and and he's in the same he's having the same bacon and egg bap in the morning is as ashley cole and and potentially like you know deck on rice or whatever and and it's just it's 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 percent 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 an influencer our ambassadors those people and we but we charge them for the ticket and they're happy to pay um and it's really cool because they're like i feel like as a result the relationship has become it's 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 a hundred 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 influencer partnership that you typically hear about where like influencer is like pay me 10 000 pounds otherwise 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 um and post about it because i think it's so interesting i think that you get a the the most unspoken about uh value of brand is the discounting that you get is like influencers 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 and really that all of that credit goes to to luke our creative director he's 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 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 man 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 yeah 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 they're faced with yeah not a lot of money and they have to make a big impact and sometimes taking that decision is is pretty tough so i'm just interested to understand a bit more about the thought process when going into that yeah so as i said we spent a lot of money early making sure that everything was super premium and the content was really good the creators we worked with were really good the photographers were really good i people weren't photographing golf in that way yet like i honestly think we were quite ahead of the curve in the way that we positioned ourselves and the way we made everything look now what's interesting is that no one really saw it because we spent no money on paid social getting out there we had no budget for um yeah we had no budget for paid social and we weren't even using iphone stuff yet and we can get onto that in a minute but like we were so keen on it being premium that we refused to 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 um there weren't that many of them but it looked really really good um 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 influencers 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 overspent on it but i would say that it's more through ignorance than anything else um it would eventually become strategy and 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 shat ourselves because we weren't getting enough awareness and it was only the it was kind of like the influencers 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 this is really cool i'm gonna shout about it fair enough fair enough and actually then let's get into more of the actual process because you know it's one thing putting something peaceful 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 manners because honestly 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 favorites like the the lock-in 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 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 halls 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 there's showed like a great creative concept with that high production value can really can really hit even in yeah you know the tick tock 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 in 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 um which where you can just like dump ideas down and and have all this stuff tracked and um yeah i mean we were so far away from this at the beginning like it was an absolute mess at the beginning it was basically us just sat around going what do you think we should do um and we'd 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 uh 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 difference is 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 um what could 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 it 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 um 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 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 uh 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 um and say how would we apply this to golf why has this worked it's all the most viral stuff on the internet why has it worked why is the format worked um how could we create this for manners this that's more like our that's our 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 rollout 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 knowing what works and what doesn't um 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 aiden is running the Ryder Cup campaign Luke and I will handle the bigger campaigns and honestly for the I'll just use an example for the Fowlweather collection it was we knew we had this opportunity to go to Iceland we knew that Iceland was this really was a really cool place for golf and it had this unique thing which is 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 we're like you know everyone speaks about the the fairweather golfer like we all know who that is we all know the fairweather 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 like 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 weather collection um partly and this is stupid but it's true we were excited about the fact that there's there'd been loads of game of thrones filmed in iceland so this was there was this whole like um rich world of like norse mythology and you can see that in the typography of the collection and stuff so i would say for for these ones it's like we we we go away and we look at all the different inputs and how they cross over and how does it apply to golfers.

42:56And 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 fucking cool story that hasn't been told in golf? Like 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 uh this is going to make you better and we don't have to say that like 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 um and it's just a way more it's a way broader way more exciting place to play in than these clothes are going to make you shoot scratch or whatever um so there's two parts there's there's one there's the like forensic analysis of how to make things go viral but the idea part it's 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 court 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 fosh who's 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 it's like he's starting from what's going to go viral and grab attention and we're not quite as cold as that but um it's an interesting thought experiment it's like if you have a campaign idea which is the foul weather collection what are the the six viral pieces of content what are the things that like they're a a representation of that idea but they're surreal they're captivating they are uh 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 weather collection for a second and think about our Reebok manners campaign um 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 it's a shoe collection so made sense with the whole walking theme and so no thanks our walk became the caption the tagline uh the campaign message and it was also a nice idea because it has that kind of polite britishness which is also a bit of a backhanded insult um which is very british and um the thinking of the viral idea for that is like 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 cart 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 manors 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 cart to get obliterated um and as we think and are probably our choose 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 reebok 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 oh let's blow up a golf cart oh let's you know let's put a wrecking ball through a golf cart for the foul weather collection it was let's climb a mountain uh with four golfers it was uh let's have a guy chipping to a green but instead of chipping a bucket of balls he's chipped 10 30 000 golf balls and we actually went and got 30 000 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 anything in our past but now we use what we know about social media to go how do we make this go viral i love that prompt of like what's the most dramatic version of this um i think that's something that so us here at rival and specifically the rival media team which i run is like one of our mandates is like come up with something ridiculous to do every single month and yeah eric has been like great with that because he's always pushed 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 actually i really love that prompt of like what's the most dramatic thing 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 web summit 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 takeaway 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.

50:20Schall's 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 we we follow the founder of instagram everyone should by the way like any brand should follow him he's just constantly telling you how to win instagram and he's absolutely obviously right um 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 to 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 and they're going to send it to 10 friends because they liked it it's like you're digitalizing that talkability feature you're digitalizing the the the like word of mouth marketing and it just self-propagates and then like the virality of social now and instagram it's like 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 that's so true all right so alex in the last segment of our brief and 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 oh cool the 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 manners 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 who it is because we're going to have a partnership next year with them it has been released yeah um 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 soup we don't want to do brand soup uh and we she hadn't really explained 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 um we are trying to to hit targets and make revenue and you know that that's a huge part of what we do it's not just creative uh but equally it feels like more and more of particularly in fashion but in every industry there's just like a land grab where it's like Like there's so much, so much done and so much of it feels haphazard and not thought out.

53:58And particularly in fashion, when you talk about collaborations, you know, the original collaborations were so novel and interesting, unique. And they were really authentic. 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 two brand logos together and you share audiences. And in a sense, that's true. Like you do share audiences. 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 Reebok because it just didn't feel right and there wasn't a good reason to do it and when Reebok came to us there's a guy called Mubi shout out Mubi he's 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 a an old reebok shoe he showed us like the heritage with john daly he'd obviously really thought about like the reebok archive the the streetwear um 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 like man is a cool uh 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 cross over and what's the cool tension and where is it going to work and it it's borne out in the products like that campaign was so exciting and such a pivotal moment for us.

56:09And as we mentioned, we got to blow up a golf cart 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 Reebok'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 were willing to take a few risks. it just made all the difference to to make that campaign really strong awesome and i i take it that's kind of the guiding like 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 from a value standpoint totally and so much of it is just how 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 we i'm quite proud of us that we didn't jump on things before this when we did need the money um we were we were quite disciplined and like we're not going to do this because 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 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 um if you have time i'd love to do a quick quick lightning round if that's okay with you to end the conversation yeah sure yeah awesome great so switching gears a little bit now if your brand were a pizza what type of pizza would it be fucking hell uh i don't eat pizza what that is that's blasphemous um i would say just because it's the best pizza i would say wide thin crust um i think you're probably dipping some garlic sauce i'm just channeling my slightly overweight co-founder luke um but for no brand reasons okay uh what's the best campaign you've seen recently

58:49i love absolutely love the new kfc campaign where they it's the tagline is uh 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 uh 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 um we'll definitely link it in the show notes here uh what's the most underrated channel for challenger brands today linkedin okay um 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 um 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 uh 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 um we've got some big ones coming next year which are super exciting um 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 there 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 and we have this idea of like half of it would be a coffee shop like you would have in 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 like installations where there's you know plants and it would feel very outdoorsy kind of yeah arcteryx vibe but then golf has that interesting duality where it's like you have the cozy warm premium richness of a clubhouse um and then you go through to the like links golf course that would be very very cool when you open that let me know i'll be 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 learned a lot for myself but i'm sure the audience have picked up a lot as well there um i'll 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 was it's good to chat with you, Vern.

1:02:28And it's, as I said, it's, it's, we still feel like a very small challenger brand. And so when anyone takes notice, especially someone like you guys, it's, it's, it's really encouraging for us. And we, we really appreciate it. And we were, we're, yeah, just the fact that some big voices are saying back to us what we, what we think we're trying to do. It's, it's very validating. So thank you. Keep doing it and look forward to seeing the growth of manners. Take care. Cheers, Farron.

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