Sports Marketing Surveys (SMS) Director Richard Payne is gearing up to address this year’s International Golf Travel Market (IGTM) Links. The event, which precedes a planned physical event in Wales in October, follows a successful trial of the online networking format in Autumn 2020. Richard’s presentation ‘The Golf Tourism Recovery: A Golfer’s Perspective shows…
Sports Marketing Surveys insights have formed a key part of Scottish Golf’s future strategy. A bespoke survey commissioned by the federation identified a clear preference among golf clubs and their members for the organisation to focus its efforts, and its investment, on the grassroots game rather than elite golf. 73% of golf clubs supported this…
After a delayed start to the year, golf fans, and particularly those who follow the Ladies’ European Tour (LET), will have much to look forward to in 2021. The announcement of a €19m record prize fund for the LET, to be distributed across a total of 27 events in 19 countries, has been welcomed across…
This article was originally written in January 2021 by SMS Director Richard Payne for The PGA Professional Magazine. If you want one word to sum up golf in 2020, try ‘resilience’. After course closures in April and May because of Coronavirus, the global golf industry could have been excused for feeling Eeyoreish at the…
They say that history repeats itself. It has to, because no one listens. Sometimes that feels true of research. After PureGym CEO Humphrey Cobbold weighed into the lockdown reopening debate to complain that ‘it’s all very well to hear that tennis and golf are reopening, but let’s be honest, those are rich people’s sports’, SMS…
]If we had told you at the start of 2020 that golf would face two plus months of closures and yet still end the year with an overall growth in rounds played in Great Britain, we might well have been committed to an asylum. At the very least, we might have found ourselves in the…
As the pandemic has lingered on, the public demand for outdoor space has never been greater. Across the globe, people are walking, running, cycling, roller-blading, rambling, picnicking and generally interacting with their local green spaces more than ever before. As part of that unlocking, many golf courses opened their paths and fairways to non-golfers as…
What does 2021 have in store for the global sports industry? The SMS team explores the trends they expect to see over the next 12 months. Game, mindset and match – sport and mental health Throughout 2021, the myriad benefits of sport for mental health will become more and more crystallised, and as this…
Liz Young is a Ladies’ European Tour player and founder of the Rose Ladies Series, the first women’s professional sport to resume after the first Coronavirus lockdown in 2020. From a single event at Liz’s home course of Brockenhurst Manor, Hampshire, Liz attracted sponsors and supporters including Justin and Kate Rose and Sky Sports, and,…
Leading sports research agency Sports Marketing Surveys (SMS) has announced plans to run a new survey targeted at the golf tourism industry. Along with the rest of the travel industry, golf tourism has been hit particularly hard by the Coronavirus in 2020. Customers have been forced to abandon or postpone trips – citing cancelled…
