Making a Name for Itself

Monticello’s New course finally has a name. Now All it needs is a reputation. by hal phillips

During the 1940s, a reclusive character known as Old Man West made his make-shift home in an isolated piece of wilderness hard by what has become the fifth green at Monticello, Utah’s new golf course. Burt West survived on apples and whatever game he could shoot or trap, or so the legend holds. Not much is known about West. He kept to himself and died alone in the 1950s.

But his peculiar legacy survives and, for a time, it appeared the city’s new golf course would further that legacy.

“To this day, that whole general area is known as ‘Old Man West,’ “ explains Bill Boyle, who edits Monticello’s newspaper, The San Juan Record. “But Old Man West was a person, a guy who showed up out of nowhere, a figure out of the ‘old west’ É That’s the intrigue of the guy - the name and the place.”

The idea of naming Monticello’s new course Old Man West GC, or something to that effect, appealed to Boyle and other folk. With construction complete and the layout scheduled to open this summer, the city has begun tackling perhaps the most daunting task related to course development in the 21st century: marketing. A vital first step in this process is coming up with a course name that piques the interest of traveling golfers.

“You can’t realistically market something to a wide area, which is our intention, with a name like Monticello Golf Course,” says Trent Schafer, the city manager. “We needed to create curiosity, something that grabs people.”

Old Man West GC was one of many appellations that were floated last fall. Boyle’s paper held an informal course-naming contest. Suggestions poured in: The Hideout at Old Man West, Wild Jack GC, Mountain Shadow, Yellowcake (a reference to the city’s radioactive past), Stallion’s Glance and Purple Sage, a nod to Zane Grey, who lived nearby.

“I kind of liked it,” Schafer says. “but it was never going to be Old Man West. It’s a location to me, but there are old-timers here who believe it’s a person - who didn’t do anything for Monticello.”

In December, when the local politics had been meted out, and the meaningful votes had been cast, the Monticello City Council issued a final decision.

Behold, The Hideout Golf Club.

You heard it here first - and should the city’s marketing efforts succeed, it won’t be the last time you hear it.

With all the courses being built in recent years (see “These Links are Your Links,” page 20), competition for golfers has become an issue, at least when the course is in the city of Monticello - a community of 2,200 souls in a remote corner of southeastern Utah.

“We have to get our name out there, but it’s not as easy as saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got a golf course down here,’” Schafer acknowledges. “We need some tools we can use to make us known: scorecards, brochures, professional course photography and a marketing plan.”

Photographers from Dogleg Studios,  a Bend, Ore., firm referred to the city by Hideout course designer Forrest Richardson, shot the layout this past fall; they will be back to finish the job this spring. Putting these images to good use - on promotional items and as part of a comprehensive marketing plan that incorporates logos and demographics - initially falls to a pair of recent hires: the Hideout’s new golf professional, Seth Allison, and Jed Norwood, CEO of Gung-ho Inc., a Monticello-based marketing firm.

Both are being paid to accentuate the positive, and Monticello has more going for it than one might think. The Hideout GC is a new course, and nothing intrigues golfers like a spanking-new track. It’s remote but, as any good marketer will tell you, “remote” is another way of saying “exotic.” To be sure, Monticello’s course is situated in some ruggedly beautiful country, within 90 minutes’ drive of Lake Powell and three national parks: Mesa Verde, Arches and Canyonlands. Monticello has a surprising number of motel rooms for a city its size, and the Hideout was built at 7,000 feet, which means summer golf - an uncomfortable proposition in places like Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and even nearby Moab - is a delightful, 85-degree prospect in Monticello.

The city’s contract with Norwood calls for Gung-ho to create a Web site (www.monticelloutah.org), a Hideout GC logo and some signage. “Finishing the Web site was our first priority in an effort to capture that summer market for 2002,” says Norwood. “Eventually, we’d like for the golf course to have its own site, so we can refer people to it directly.”

Beyond these initial three projects, Norwood has some broader ideas about how the city should market itself and The Hideout. “We’ll need to contact and develop a clientele, and a lot of that should be handled by direct contact: phone calls, direct mail then a phone call, magazine ads, Web ads É We should try to get some TV spots in Salt Lake, Denver and then California - which provides Utah with 28 percent of its domestic tourism. Spots that tout the course, tout the city. And we’d like to do some press releases aimed at different news outlets and other news agencies that ‘discover’ this sort of destination.”

ALL THIS MARKETING costs money, of course, something Monticellans are fortunate to have, courtesy of a $7.2 million buyout that obliged the city to complete a federal Superfund clean-up of the uranium and vanadium processing plant that operated in Monticello from 1941-60. The remediation effort is finished; so is the new course, built and fully outfitted with the funds left over. Schafer estimates Monticello has spent approximately $5.2 million on both projects, leaving plenty of money for marketing.

“We don’t have a set-aside marketing budget; we’re really playing that by ear,” says Schafer, who notes that the city could spend as much as $100,000 on promoting The Hideout this year, a princely sum relative to what many new courses spend in their first year of operation.

But every project is different and comparisons are difficult. The Golf Club at Redlands Mesa, an upscale daily-fee that opened last June in Grand Junction, Colo., plans to spend $45,000 on marketing during 2002. However, that project includes housing, and its 2002 real estate marketing budget is three times that of its golf operation. Obviously, course “awareness” will benefit from dollars spent on marketing the attached real estate.

This year, green fees at The Hideout have been set at $20 for 18 holes, $12 for a cart. Schafer has projected 10,000 rounds the first 12 months, with 10 percent increases each of the following two years. “That would break us even in three years, and those are very conservative estimates,” he says. “Moab [GC] does 30,000 rounds a year; 20,000 shouldn’t be that difficult for us.”

Monticello’s case is unique, too. On account of the federal buyout, Monticello will operate The Hideout with no debt service, a huge factor in making these numbers work. As a rule of thumb, most new courses spend 6-8 percent of revenue on marketing. At $100,000, Monticello’s tentative marketing budget would far exceed that percentage. But because of its paltry population base, The Hideout must draw its players from further afield, and that costs money.

Not surprisingly, Schafer and Norwood have embraced what many course operators across the nation have grudgingly accepted: that facilities often need to pool their resources to attract traveling golfers - that’s why all these “golf trails” have cropped up of late. Norwood calls it “fusion marketing,” and while it may seem antithetical for one course to cooperate so closely with its competitors, savvy marketers recognize this is a practical way to accumulate meaningful marketing dollars and, by extension, generate sustained media exposure.

A “Four Corners Golf Trail” has been on Schafer’s mind for quite some time; the idea was hatched by Richardson, whose design proposal included this and several other marketing ideas that have retained currency with The Hideout brain trust. Golfers probably aren’t going to drive seven hours from Phoenix to play The Hideout. But they may well commit to a four-day, “Four Corners” trip whose itinerary includes The Hideout and three other high-quality courses, say, Pi–on Hills GC in Farmington, N.M. (two hours to the southeast), Moab GC (an hour north) and Redlands Mesa (two hours northeast). “There is an advantage,” Schafer notes, “to being in the middle of nowhere: travel in any direction and, pretty soon, you’re somewhere.”

Setting aside the prospect of golfers on week-long safari, will players actually drive the 250 miles from, say, Provo to play The Hideout? It’s a fair question. But remember, here in the West where skies are big and speed limits often ignored, driving three hours isn’t a big deal. Here, the 175 miles to Grand Junction is just a “tough commute.”

“I think we can be successful in getting the people in the Salt Lake area,” says Schafer. “They get anxious to get out of the city, just as we become anxious to get to the city. It’s not uncommon to drive three hours to get away for the weekend.”

Everyone involved with the development and ongoing management of The Hideout accepts the fact that the facility must be marketed “abroad,” if you will. In the meantime, it will be Allison’s job to prime the pump locally. “This is really going to be one of the nicest facilities in all of Utah,” he proclaims. “When people think ‘small city course,’ they don’t picture an 18-hole facility this good. We’re going to get the message out that we’re here, and once they play it, they’ll come back.

“Inside the region, I’m going to concentrate on the ladies and juniors. We’ve already had a ton of women stop by and express interest: the ladies association from Moab has called; the state ladies’ association president called, wondering when they can come out.”

Reading between the lines, Allison touches on one of Monticello’s dirty little secrets: not many city residents actually play golf. “I think one of our goals is to re-create the local interest. We’ve lost that,” Schafer says. “You spend $3 million to $4 million on a golf course, and you want to say you’re doing it for the community, but they can’t really support it; they can’t make it run in the black. So we have to get the tourists in here to do that. Even so, the appeal of golf locally has just fallen on its face.”

At Blue Mountain Meadows GC, the nine-hole course that was plowed under to make way for the new one, Schafer notes, 42 golfers participated in the 2000 Tuesday Night Men’s League: 36 from nearby Blanding and two from Bluff. Do the math: That’s four Monticellans.

“We’re working on a slogan: ‘Cool Climate, Warm Welcome,’ “ Allison reveals. “We want to use ‘high-desert country’ as a marketing theme. We want people to know that even though we’re here in the southeast corner, we’re the highest golf course in Utah.”

Is it really?

“Sure is. We beat the Park City courses out by a couple hundred feet.”

So, Seth: As the Hideout is targeting folks from outside the immediate area, what words would folks in, say, Cedar City use to describe Monticello? “Wild. Untamed ... And we’re going to build on that: If you robbed something, you’d go to a remote area - we are that remote area. This is a place to get away from the city, to get away from it all.”

That Burt West: He was onto something.