A few months ago, we posted the 2020 edition of our One Word Survey. This is now the third time we’ve played our favorite word association game.
If you don’t recall or are just stumbling onto this for the first time, the idea is for you to choose the golf equipment brand you most associate with each of the words we presented. Figuring some of you might have other brands in mind or that a given adjective wasn’t applicable to any brand, we also gave you a none of the above option. For the sake of consistency, we left the survey largely unchanged from the original. However, we did add a couple of new words to reflect recent industry trends.
We understand that the one-word approach doesn’t leave much room for nuance but that’s part of what makes this exercise so interesting. We don’t know what your second choice might have been; we only know the frequency at which each brand was chosen.
By looking at year-over-year changes, we can get a sense of how the market is shifting and how your perceptions of brands may be shifting with it. When big brands experience big shifts, it can be telling.
It’s also notable when a smaller brand moves the needle for a given word. We expect market-leading brands will be selected more often for both positive and negative words. Those are the names golfers know. They’re the brands golfers buy most often. So, when a challenger brand factors significantly in the results, it’s worth pointing out.
