TaylorMade Adidas Buying Adams Golf is No Joke

There is an old joke that goes, “Did you hear about the Dachshund that killed the Pit Bull Terrier…? it got stuck in the Pit Bull’s throat and choked it.”

So cavernous is the  maw of TaylorMade Adidas (TMAG) Adams Golf would barely have touched the sides as it went down, and Yes! Golf even less so. TMAG will not have acquired Adams for its business acumen; the business acumen left Adams a few weeks back to take over at Callaway. 

 So did it acquire a brand? Well, outside of the US Adams Golf had no brand – certainly not in Europe. At around the time Adams acquired Yes! Golf (January 2011) Yes!’s UK PR division asked the question of about a dozen golf editors in the UK, Germany, Scandinavia and Spain what they knew of Adams Golf. They knew virtually nothing, but were all desperately keen to learn more.

What they did know about Adams were two things. One is Tom Watson. The other is the fact that the golf clubs represented one of the last bastions of individual style, pioneering design capabilities and credibility [with this level of market maturity]. It’s one reason why the Adams / Yes! Golf link-up was so popular… it was a meeting of minds in that two underdog brands on the rise would stand against the  might of the corporate Big Brands, giving Tour players an honest advantage and the club players exceptional value for money and street cred.

This spirit will be anathema to TMAG, a slick and powerful multi-national brand with bottomless pockets (at this year’s PGA Show in Orlando, TaylorMade actually occupied one entire exhibition hall by itself and did a reasonable job of replicating a Mayan-like Temple to the great god TM), because the maverick designer spirits of people like Harold Swash right down to the lowest design studio apprentice are troublesome, idiosyncratic types who aren’t with the moneymen.

Fair play to MyGolfSpy who leapt on the story, and – resisting the temptation to cut and paste excerpts from the official statement – actually went the route of proper journalism and presented to subscribers a better thought out (and more thought-provoking) analysis of the purchase.

TaylorMade are not outright charlatans. There is an undoubted quality in their product offering and their business model is demonstrably astute, but the likely worst case scenario for golfers like you and me will be the reduced choice. TMAG does not strike one as a company that will encourage an internal design facility peopled by Adams and Yes! blue-sky-thinkers, certainly if it looks remotely possible that these troublemakers will cause drag to the bottom line or the over-arching strategic policies of the new parent company.

But $70 million is a lot of money for anybody to pay, simply to icebox a competitive brand in the interests of juggernaut pursuit of market domination. For the quickest likely ROI, TMAG will maintain the Adams (and possibly Yes!) brands, certainly as long as Adams’s own momentum will take it along continuously to generate revenue from the improving golfer / women’s / Seniors’ / Hybrid markets. That’s just common sense. What cannot be taken as a given, however, is that once this momentum runs down there will be any further investment in product developments at this level.

Where most golf clubs are manufactured in China, there are plants that produce clubs for more than one brand. Commonplace anecdotal evidence says that for many clubs, the only difference is the brand name with which they are stamped at the end of the manufacturing process. One has to fear that as the PR momentum Adams does have begins to wane, economies of scale will become more appealing to the bean-counters.

This is not an inevitable scenario but it is one that has been used successfully in other markets, one example being guitars. Most men between the ages of 20 and 70 who ever dreamed of copying their rock n roll heroes and bought a guitar between the years 1950 and 1999 might still find some of the iconic brand names of their youth to be available. Of course, they might not. But what is true today is that of the dozens of guitar brands that do survive, virtually all are owned by just four companies: Gibson, Fender, Ibanez and Samec.

Among the consequences of this consolidation are the introduction of crucifying terms to retailers (take it or leave it) forced economies on production processes and QC issues, reduced customer choice, reduced customer choice and…er… reduced customer choice.

 TMAG aren’t idiots but if they’re inured to what the market is saying at street level they could really screw themselves here.