Golf Day Gift and Prize Ideas With Your Branding

A golf day is three merchandise decisions rather than one. There is the tee gift every player picks up at registration, the on-course prizes for longest drive and nearest the pin, and the prize table at dinner.

They have different budgets, different audiences and different jobs, and treating them as one line is why golf day merchandise so often ends up either too thin at the presentation or too expensive for the field.

Here is what works at each.

The tee gift

The tee gift goes to everybody, so it is bought on cost per unit and on whether it is useful during the round.

Golf tees

The obvious answer and still the right one. Golfers lose tees constantly, so a handful in a pocket gets used rather than politely accepted, and a printed tee is in somebody's hand on every hole. Wooden tees take a print well and are the standard.

Golf balls

More expensive than tees and more appreciated, with one caveat covered below.

A pitch mark repairer, usually with a magnetic ball marker

Small, cheap, genuinely useful, and it lives in a pocket or on a cap for years. On value per pound this is one of the best items on the whole list.

A golf towel

Clips to the bag, gets used every round, carries a large logo and lasts for seasons. If the budget allows one step up from tees, this is where to put it.

A bag tag

Cheap, permanently attached, and seen every time the bag comes out of a car boot.

Present them together in a small branded bag at registration and the whole thing reads as considered rather than as items on a table.

The point about golf balls that golfers will notice

Branded golf balls are printed onto stock balls, which means you are choosing a base model as well as a print.

That choice matters more than it does on almost any other promotional product, because golfers have opinions about balls. A logo on a cheap base model tends to end up as the ball somebody uses over water, precisely because they do not mind losing it. A logo on a model people would actually choose gets played, which is the entire point.

If golf balls are part of your order, ask which base models are available before you decide on quantity. Spending slightly more on fewer balls generally produces a better result than the reverse, and it is one of the few places where a golf audience can tell exactly what you spent.

On-course prizes

Longest drive and nearest the pin are won by one person each, announced to the room, and usually photographed. They sit between the tee gift and the main prizes on budget.

Things that work at this tier: a branded golf towel of better quality than the tee gift version, a headcover, a decent drinks bottle, a sleeve of premium balls, or a small engraved award.

The test is whether it looks like it was worth walking off the green for. It does not need to be expensive. It needs to look chosen.

The prize table

Main prizes go to the winning team, the runners-up and the best individual, and they are handed over in front of everybody at dinner.

A prize has to do two things a giveaway does not: look worth competing for at the moment it is presented, and get kept afterwards.

Golf umbrellas are the classic and they work for a reason. They are unmistakably a golf item, they are large enough to read across a dinner table, and they get used every time somebody plays in bad weather. Our guide to branded umbrellas covers what to look for in one, because a golf umbrella that inverts is a poor advertisement.

Golf bags and holdalls are the top tier and are what a winning team remembers.

Engraved glassware or an award suits the presentation itself and photographs well, though it is kept on a shelf rather than used.

Premium drinkware works well and travels outside golf, which suits a mixed field where not everybody is a serious golfer.

One honest suggestion: the prize does not have to be golf equipment. Most people at a corporate golf day already own golf equipment. A genuinely good bottle, bag or piece of drinkware is often more welcome than more of what is already in the boot.

Budget per prize rather than in total. A golf day usually has five to eight prize categories once you count longest drive, nearest the pin, best individual, best team and the raffle, so a single prize figure will not survive contact with the running order.

What people actually keep

If you want the merchandise to still be working next season, this is the shortlist.

Golf towels, pitch mark repairers, ball markers and headcovers. All four live in a bag or a pocket, all four are seen by playing partners every round, and all four last years. None of them is expensive.

Umbrellas and bags at the prize tier, for the same reason.

Anything with the year printed on it is the exception, and it is the one thing to avoid. If your golf day is annual, leave the date off and the kit keeps working next year. Our guide to merchandise ROI covers why retention matters more than unit price.

If it is a charity golf day

Most corporate golf days raise money for something, which adds two considerations.

The beneficiary's branding usually sits alongside the organiser's, and the simplest way to handle it is to let the charity supply their own items for the tee gift bag rather than trying to combine both logos on one product.

And prizes do double duty, because anything left over from the prize table can go into the raffle or the auction, which is where a good deal of the money is actually raised. Ordering slightly more than your prize categories require is usually worth it. Our guide to promotional products for charity events and fundraisers covers buying on charity funds.

You can see how one charity golf day handled both tiers in our case study on the Phegsdann Charity Golf Day, where every player received printed tees at check-in and branded golf umbrellas went to the competition and raffle winners.

Ordering

Work out the field size first, then the prize categories, then buy the two tiers separately. The tee gift is a single large order and the prizes are several small ones, so they behave differently on minimums and often on lead time.

Order earlier than feels necessary if your day falls in the busy part of the season, and earlier again if anything is being engraved, since engraving adds a step. Every product page shows a guaranteed delivery date before you order.

To see what is available, browse our golf day collection or our golf products. Tell us your field size and your prize categories and we will tell you what we would order.