Private Club Marketing
You have five days. The wine arrives on Thursday, and your members will be eating dinner that night whether or not you invite them. Most clubs will let the date pass. A few will put a simple table together, pour a glass and give members a reason to come in on a Thursday in November. […]
Once a year, a medieval hospital in Burgundy sells several hundred barrels of wine to a room of strangers, and the whole town turns into a three-day party around it. The wine is young, the barrels are not yet bottled, and the buyers are betting on what it will taste like once it has aged. […]
The fee that stops most people at the barn door is rarely the one on the brochure. A new rider hears a modest monthly number, signs up, and then discovers that the horse, the stall, the lessons and the hours owed to the club are a separate set of bills. Equestrian clubs sell a way […]
On the fourth Thursday of November, trailers start rolling into church lots and hayfields across the horse country of the East Coast. Riders in scarlet coats walk their horses past families holding paper cups of cider. A priest steps up beside a pack of hounds that has been waiting all autumn for this particular morning, […]
For one weekend in November, a stretch of the Las Vegas Strip becomes a racetrack, and every luxury brand in the city wants a seat near it. Hospitality is the business of the weekend, and the people who buy it are the kind of people private clubs spend years trying to reach. A driving club […]
The clubhouse has a pool and a dining room, and the main attraction is a strip of asphalt outside the window. Members arrive in their own cars and spend the day lapping. At the top end, the fee to get through the gate has passed what many golf clubs charge. Motorsport clubs are now a […]
Ask three clubs what their wellness program costs and you will get three different kinds of answer. One will say it comes with your dues. One will hand you a menu with prices by the hour. One will tell you to call. All three are pricing the same thing, and the differences say more about […]
The wellness industry holds its annual summit this week, and by January the headlines will say what it expects members to want next year. Your 2027 budget does not have to wait for them. Most of what the next forecast will say about clubs can be read, with caution, from the one before it. The […]
Few addresses in Boston carry as much history in as little frontage as Eight Park Street. Two Beacon Hill mansions sit beside the State House, overlooking the Common, and a club has filled them since the middle of the Civil War. Anyone curious enough to ask what membership costs will find that the answer is […]
The Metropolitan Club of Washington sits a few blocks from the White House, in a clubhouse that has stood on H Street since 1908. Search for what it costs to join and you will get a confident number almost instantly. Some of those numbers belong to a different club in a different city. That is […]