Filling tee times in the middle of summer — especially as many spots in the South suffered through one of the most difficult hot-weather stretches in years — is an arduous task.
Paulie Dery, the chief marketing officer at Austin-based Yeti, and his team used the heat as a chance to get creative in expanding their reach into the golf space. The final product was a novel (and frankly, hilarious) golf tournament held at ShadowGlen Golf Club, just outside the state’s capital in the late August heat.
Heat Strokes by Yeti changes the narrative around par at a golf course; rather than a previously assigned score to match, par during this event is related to the day’s high temperature. If the mercury hits 103, that’s the score the golfers are attempting to beat.
The company developed a toolkit containing everything a local course would need to promote this new scoring system. The event kicked off with a shotgun start featuring 18 foursomes (72 players) in total, with a goal of playing the full tournament during the hottest window of the day.
Of course, the cooler maker came up with specific products to surround the tournament, and the idea proved a winner — within three hours of opening registration for the event, all the tee times were filled.
“If you think about it, we started in fishing because we love fishing, and we’ve solved a problem that we could stay out fishing longer. If we had a nice cooler to stand on and keep our fish fresh, but then it found the outdoors, right?” Dery said. “It found alpine, it found surf, it found barbecue. It found all these places that we never built the thing to manage. But once we saw it take footing, we then invested in those communities.
“Golf is one of those other ones. We never built this stuff for golf carts, but that’s where we see it all. And so it’s the time where you’re like, OK, the golf community has embraced the product, let’s get more involved.”
Now that the concept has been vetted, Dery hopes to offer it up to other courses throughout the country as a pre-packaged promotional tool for courses throughout the south to use to entice golfers at the hottest time of day.
“It doesn’t look like it’s going to get any cooler in the future,” Dery said.