Your Golf Course Has No Personality

Walk into any golf course’s Instagram page.

Read the tagline on their homepage.

Flip through their email newsletter.

Now do it again. With the next course. And the next one.

They all sound like the same person wrote them. Because in a way — no one did.

No one sat down and decided who this course actually is. So the brand became a committee. Corporate. Safe. Forgettable.

And forgettable doesn’t fill tee sheets.

The Problem Isn’t Your Posting Schedule

Most courses assume their marketing problem is a volume problem. Post more. Email more. Run more ads.

It’s not.

It’s a voice problem.

When your brand has no clear personality, every person who touches your marketing — your GM, your social coordinator, your seasonal hire who “knows Instagram” — fills the vacuum with their own interpretation. The result is inconsistency. And inconsistency erodes trust faster than a bad review.

Golfers don’t just choose a course because the price is right. They choose a course because something about it felt like it was for them. That feeling starts with voice.

Why This Keeps Happening

Because no one ever ran the exercise.

Courses launch. Logos get designed. A website goes live. Someone posts on Instagram. And somewhere in all of that — the question of who the brand actually is never gets answered. Not really.

So the brand defaults to whatever feels safe. “Premier golf experience.” “Championship-caliber conditions.” “Where memories are made.”

Phrases that could belong to any course. In any city. On any continent.

You can’t build a recognizable brand on language that applies to everyone.

What the Best Courses Do Differently

They treat their brand like a character.

Not a mood board. Not a font. A character — with a voice, a personality, a set of quirks that make them unmistakably themselves.

And the best way we’ve found to unlock that character? A workshop exercise we call the Cocktail Party. The Cocktail Party is not our creation, we stumbled across it and have evolved it to work within our process.

“The goal isn’t to manufacture a personality. It’s to find the one that’s already there — and decide if it’s who you want to be.”

The Cocktail Party Exercise (Run This With Your Team)

Here’s the exercise we use in our Brand Identity workshops. You can run it with your team right now. Give it 45 minutes and an honest room.

Close your eyes. Imagine you’re at a cocktail party. Your coworkers are there. Your guests. Your competitors — the course down the road that always seems to be doing a little better than you’d like.

Now imagine your golf course walks through the door as a person.

Watch them enter. Ask yourself:

• What do they look like? What are they wearing?
• How did they walk in — loud and heads-turning, or quiet and uncertain?
• Did anyone notice?

Now watch them work the room:

• How do they carry themselves? Confident? Cocky? Open? Guarded?
• How do they talk to your staff?
• How do they talk to strangers — potential guests?
• How do they handle the competition? Dismissive? Respectful? Threatened?

Let them mingle for a while. Watch their habits. Their quirks. The things they do that nobody told them to do.

Then watch them walk to the bar.

What do they order?

Now — they’ve had a few. They’re loosening up. Watch what changes:

• Are they louder now? Funnier? More honest?
• Do they say things they wouldn’t normally say?
• What qualities get amplified when the filter comes down?

That last part is the most important. The tipsy version is the truth version. What gets louder is what’s really there. And that’s usually what’s most usable.

The goal isn’t to manufacture a personality. It’s to find the one that’s already there — and decide if it’s who you want to be.

What This Looks Like in Practice: Chambers Bay

When we ran this exercise with the team at Chambers Bay, the first pass was revealing.

The consensus? Scrappy. A little defensive. Still carrying the weight of US Open criticism that had followed the course for years.

That character was real. But it wasn’t who Chambers Bay wanted to be.

So we built someone new.

“The Charismatic Alpha. He is the reason the hero ventures out on a journey. He is the catalyst — the one who enters the story and makes it impossible for the hero to remain in status quo.”

Chambers Bay became a man with casual charm and laid-back confidence. As comfortable in a suit as jeans and a t-shirt. Approachable enough to ease your nerves on the first tee. Proud enough to point out the view on 7 and playfully dare you to clear the train tracks on 16.

That character now lives in every caption, every email, every piece of copy that comes out of the course. It’s one voice. One personality. Unmistakably Chambers.

That’s what the exercise produces when you take it seriously.

Why This Is a Revenue Decision

A consistent brand voice isn’t a “nice to have.”

It’s what makes your marketing compound.

When your email sounds like your Instagram sounds like your website sounds like the person who picks up the phone — trust builds. And trust converts.

When every piece of content sounds like a different person wrote it — trust erodes. And you end up running more promotions to compensate for a connection you never built.

Marketing that sounds like everyone fills nothing. Marketing that sounds like someone fills tee sheets.

How We Think About It at Par Six

The Cocktail Party is one of the first things we do in our Brand Identity workshop with every new client.

Not because it’s a fun exercise — though it is. Because until we know who the course is, we can’t write for it. We can’t build a homepage that sounds right. We can’t produce social content that feels consistent. We can’t train a team to stay on-brand if the brand isn’t defined.

Voice comes first. Everything else is downstream.