Darrell Survey Company
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The Darrell Survey Company is an independent arbiter of golf equipment equipment usage. It records the equipment used by professional golfers and reports its findings to manufacturers of golf equipment.
Currently, the Darrell Survey covers more than 180 tournaments each season on the PGA, Champions, LPGA and Nationwide Tours, the Japan Golf Tour and at the British Open, as well as selected USGA and NCAA events.
Surveyor inspect the bag of every player, reporting on usage of clubs, balls, shirts, shoes, spikes, shafts, grips and headgear.
The Darrell Survey also performs consumer research, visiting public and private golf courses around the world to observe what recreational golfers are using and to ask them what they think about their equipment.
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[edit] History
In the 1932, Eddie Darrell was invited by A.J. Spalding & Brothers to tour the United States with some of the world's best golfers in order to promote the Scottish game of golf, and to standardize the way it was being played in America. At their exhibition games, Eddie Darrell would announce the shots over the public address system, then pack up the players' equipment in the Spalding truck and head on to the next town.
As tournament golf developed in the U.S., Eddie started an official weekly report of the equipment that the players were using. This came to be known as the "Darrell Survey"
Eddie and his wife Virginia carried on the survey until 1980, when they turned the company over to Susan Minkley Naylor, a longtime family friend and employee, and her brother John Minkley.
A relatively recent milestone for the Darrell Survey was the inauguration of Japan Golf Tour surveys in the 1998 season.
[edit] Tournament Equipment Usage Reports
Darrell Survey's clients, manufacturers from the golf industry, use the Darrell Survey data to:
- Verify players’ contractual obligations
- Substantiate advertising claims
The Darrell Survey provides third-party verification of equipment usage independent of any manufacturer, Tour or player group. In addition, the Tours use the survey for credentialing purposes to determine equipment-company access to players.
The Darrell survey does not sell data to anyone except golf-industry manufacturers for player confidentiality reasons.
Each week Darrell surveyors gather information on every club, ball, bag, shirt, headgear and pair of shoes (including spikes) for each player at the tournament the survey is attending. Details such as lofts, shafts and grips of each club are recorded. On occasion, raingear, sunglasses and other equipment types are also recorded.
[edit] Consumer Research
The Darrell Survey extended its research to the consumer marketplace beginning in 1981.
The Darrell Consumer Survey focuses on equipment usage demographics by brand and model. The survey uses face-to-face interviews conducted on randomly selected golf courses, yielding a widely used baseline report on golf-equipment usage. The survey results are accessed through a browser-like data-mining interface called the Darrell Survey CUSP System.
Available analyses include brand share of new equipment in use versus total equipment in use; gender and age of player; handicap (score) of player; frequency of playing golf; years of golfers' experience; public versus private course usage; regional usage throughout the United States; factors influencing equipment purchase; equipment purchase locations; ratings of golfers' satisfaction with their equipment; and ideal next brand and model of equipment.
Nearly 7,000 consumer golfers are interviewed face-to-face by the Darrell Survey each year in the U.S.
