My Golf Magazine Rant…

I subscribe to most major golf publications to try to stay on top of marketing in the U.S golf industry. Its actually quite affordable right now as Golf Digest is offering 12 issues for only 12 bucks a year, can't go wrong with that deal and it beats buying it for full value at the book store. What I do is combine all the magazines I want to subscribe to and go with a company that offers it bulk to businesses, this is usually what doctor's offices and other places of business do.  Magazines are expensive now days and it seems as if we are getting less substance in recent years. I suggest using bulk subscription companies instead of paying top dollar off the news rack.

Something that bugs me is the amount of ad's in the magazines now days. I understand they are a business and want to earn as much revenue as possible but it does make it less pleasurable for the reader and In my opinion when you loose touch with the reader things go downhill.  Especially today with the Internet taking readers away from printed publications it's even more vital to tell it like it is.  I did a quick count of the ad's in the April issue of Golf Digest and it came out to approximately 97 ad's vs 102 content pages. I think I was being kind as many of the pages I counted as content had partial ad's on them and many were also full page images. In the end about 50% of the magazine is made of ad's.

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It has also become obvious that often they print what some OEM's say true or not, I'm not talking about ad's I am talking about in their content. This makes it very hard to believe their articles at times.  You rarely see anything negative in these magazines even where it's deserved.  How can everything improve your game? 10 years ago magazines was not this saturated with ad's and 20 years ago they had even fewer, It was pretty pure back then IMO.

I guess I am spoiled as Japanese golf magazines get real in depth. They cover things that OEMs don't want covered and publish special issues done by independent testing groups like shaft bible's and special testing reports who often just slaughter new clubs.  This is the same for Japanese review web sites.  I don't understand why but many U.S websites are starting to stick to marketing claims, kissing the butt of the OEM's when I feel it's our duty to say what we think no matter the direct relationship or not.

Another thing that I see is that Japanese golfers can buy a new fancy expensive club and when it comes time to review it, they are brutally honest in their opinions. We run the website MyGolfClubReviews.com and also pay attention to comments posted on our website and other websites. On the U.S side it appears the consumer almost always justifies their club purchase by saying they gained 20 yards or it's their best club ever. Very few admit what they just purchased was a piece of junk or how it didn't work as they expected.   Is this the consumer simply Justifying their purchase?  Is the honeymoon period in the U.S stronger or does it last any longer? Are we just susceptible to hype and marketing?  We need to be more critical guy's!

Ok Rant over! Vote in the poll to show where you stand on this subject ( you may select more than one answer up to 4 total ).

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