Houston Club tour report - Assignment Example

Houston Club Tour Report Located in Houston, Texas, the Houston Club is one of the clubs that we visited with our class under the leadership of Professor Hoey. The club, which is located in One Shell Plaza, is a private members’ club with members drawn from various professions such as doctors, politicians, business leaders, entrepreneurs, and other members with some of its high-ranking members including former President George H. W. Bush. Most importantly, the General Manager and the Membership Director told us that they drew membership from the city’s financial, cultural, civic, and business communities, which highlights its importance in the city.

Houston Club understands the importance of having a high number of members in order to keep it operational. In this case, the company has implemented an efficient membership marketing structure that has ensured that the club’s membership segment of golf club approximate 400 members, the country club has about 600 members, and there are about 1,000 members in the club’s dining, sporting, and business segment. In effect, the club appears to be doing well in an environment where some of the clubs were closing down in Florida.

However, the club’s main advantage was that there were fewer clubs within its area of operations. For Houston Club, exclusivity is one of the marketing strategies that the company has utilized in order to gain more members than other clubs. In this case, the club has packaged itself as an exclusive Gentlemen’s Club, which is an important strategy of the club in differentiating itself from its competitors. Exclusivity is evident in the club’s facilities ranging from their rooms and other important features such as wine lockers stocked with some of the most expensive wines.

The exclusivity makes more members want to join the club and become part of the elite. After identifying the importance of this strategy in gaining more members, the club consequently introduced three segments of membership with these three being golf club membership, country club membership, and the other segment drawing membership from people interested in dining, sporting, and business. In this way, the club has a capacity to market its membership across members with varying interests. Other than membership marketing strategy focusing on the club’s exclusivity, the PR team packaged offers from the club, sent invitations to the city’s law firms, and then focused on the oil, gas, and financial industries by sending invitations to members who were attracted to the packages offered by the club.

This pushed the club’s membership up with members signing up for packages that were according to their standards of living. In conclusion, it is evident that Houston Club’s exclusive membership plays an important role in membership marketing as it differentiates the club from its competitors. In most cases, word of mouth is responsible for members wishing to join the exclusive club, which highlights one approach through which Houston Club has benefited by its exclusivity. On the other hand, the invitations sent through the PR team packaged the club attractively to a majority of potential clients who joined due to the differentiated packages offered by the club.