They Knew Their Customer. But Which Customer?
What the Good Good–Callaway controversy reveals about customer tunnel vision, organizational growth, and the need to zoom out
Over the past several days, the controversy surrounding Good Good Golf and Callaway has found its way into our household more than most brand crises would.
There is a personal reason for that.
My son, Eion, is a designer and golf content creator. He has built an audience of more than 100,000 followers on TikTok, nearly that many on Instagram, and a growing YouTube community. Brand opportunities come his way regularly. As his presence has grown, so have our family conversations about the companies he chooses to work with.
We do not talk only about what a brand is offering him. We talk about whether the partnership makes sense. Does he believe in the product? Does the brand fit the audience that trusts him? What will the association say about him—and what will his participation communicate about the brand?
Creator partnerships are an exchange of more than reach. They are an exchange of trust.
That is one reason the Good Good situation caught my attention. But I was also looking at it as a woman and as someone whose work centers on Customer Alignment.
Like many people, my first reaction was: How did this get approved?
The more important question may be: Who did the organizations involved believe their customer was when they approved it?
The ad was the visible failure
The now-removed advertisement promoted a co-branded Good Good and Callaway driver. In the opening scene, Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark appeared to shove fellow Good Good personality Alexis Miestowski to the ground after she reached toward the club. He then stood over her and said, “Do not touch my new driver.”
The concept was reportedly intended as a parody tied to the current popularity of Obsession. The participants knew one another. The scene was staged. The people closest to the production may have understood the context, the personalities, and the intended humor.
But the public did not experience the creative brief. It experienced the finished ad.
The video was removed after immediate criticism that it trivialized violence against women. Good Good and Callaway apologized. Callaway later acknowledged that its review process had not been comprehensive enough, ended its three-year relationship with Good Good, and committed $1 million to organizations addressing violence against women. Major retailers pulled Good Good merchandise, Good Good stepped away as title sponsor of a PGA Tour event, and Golf Channel canceled the 2026 season of Big Break x Good Good. The commercial consequences accumulated in a matter of days. (Associated Press; Golf Channel)
It would be easy to label this a terrible creative decision and stop there.
But a co-branded campaign does not reach the public through one person’s judgment alone. The concept moved through two organizations and multiple opportunities for someone to widen the lens.
That is what makes this an alignment story.
They may have known one customer very well
Good Good became successful, in part, because it understood an audience that traditional golf media was not reaching in the same way. It brought a creator-first, personality-driven and more casual energy to the sport, building a large and loyal community—particularly among younger golf fans.
It is possible that the people developing the ad were deeply familiar with that core audience. It is also possible that their familiarity created a blind spot.
A post-release study by consumer insights company Zappi helps illustrate the risk. Zappi tested the ad with 150 U.S. consumers who shop for sports and outdoor products. The sample is small and should be treated as directional, but the difference in how men and women experienced the ad was striking.
Sixty-three percent of men said the ad made them feel more positively toward Callaway, compared with only 29% of women. Meanwhile, 37% of women said it made them feel more negatively toward Callaway, versus 13% of men. The creative also substantially underperformed advertising norms for appeal, relevance, brand fit and its likelihood to influence behavior. (Zappi)
In other words, the ad may have landed with part of the audience in something close to the way its creators intended.
That is not a defense of the ad. It is an important organizational insight.
An organization can understand one segment of its audience very well and still misunderstand the larger customer system surrounding it.
Customer understanding has a shelf life
This is something I see regularly in organizations: leaders continue making decisions based on a picture of the customer that was once accurate.
But customers change. Markets change. Expectations change. And, sometimes, the organization grows into a much larger ecosystem than the one it originally learned to serve.
This is one way Alignment Drift™ begins: the organization continues acting from an old understanding while the external reality surrounding it moves on.
Good Good is no longer only a YouTube channel speaking to its earliest followers. It became an apparel and equipment brand with women’s product lines, major retail distribution, corporate partners, television programming, investors and a relationship with the PGA Tour.
Its business “customer” now extends far beyond the people most familiar with the personalities and inside humor of its original content.
That wider system includes:
- Loyal Good Good followers
- Women and girls entering and shaping the future of golf
- Callaway customers
- Retail partners and their customers
- Television viewers, advertisers and sponsors
- PGA Tour audiences
- Parents of younger followers
- Employees, investors and business partners
- People encountering the brand outside the golf community
Not everyone in that list is a customer in the narrow transactional sense. But each can influence the trust, access, reputation and commercial relationships on which the business depends.
This is why Customer Alignment requires more than knowing your core buyer. A company must understand the full system in which its decisions will be experienced.
Knowing your most loyal customer deeply is a strength.
Mistaking that customer for your entire market is a risk.
Explore More: Organizations Don’t Drift Overnight. They Stop Reconnecting to Reality.
When idea momentum outruns organizational judgment
We do not know what happened inside Good Good or Callaway before the ad was released. We do not know whether someone objected, whether concerns were minimized, or whether the risk simply went unseen.
But the outcome leaves important questions:
- Who was invited into the review process?
- Whose perspective was missing?
- Did each organization assume the other had adequately pressure-tested the concept?
- Was anyone explicitly responsible for evaluating the whole picture and impact to the reputation?
- If someone felt uncomfortable, did that person have the authority and psychological safety to stop the launch?
Ideas develop momentum. Once a team becomes excited about a concept, the conversation can quietly shift from “Should we do this?” to “How do we make this work?”
Everyone begins solving for execution. The creative team develops the story. The talent plays its role. Marketing prepares the launch. Partners coordinate distribution. Each person does the work immediately in front of them.
And no one remains responsible for zooming out.
This is why alignment cannot mean agreement. Healthy alignment requires constructive dissent. It requires people who can challenge an idea without being treated as negative, resistant or disloyal.
The strongest teams do not simply give people permission to speak. They create a clear expectation that someone must pressure-test the thinking.
Values must function before the apology
Both Good Good and Callaway said the ad did not reflect their values. Good Good emphasized its commitment to making golf inclusive, while Callaway acknowledged its responsibility and strengthened its approval procedures.
Those responses matter. Organizations should learn, take accountability and improve.
But the situation also raises a broader question for every leadership team:
If a stated value cannot influence a decision before it is made, is it truly operating as a value—or only as a statement?
Values become real when they function as decision criteria.
If inclusion is a core value, a creative review should ask who may feel excluded, diminished or harmed by the concept.
If trust is a core value, the team should examine whose trust is being borrowed and potentially placed at risk.
If a brand promises to grow the game, it should consider how the message will be experienced by the very people it hopes to invite into it.
That does not require a months-long research project for every piece of social content. It does require more intentional friction around high-visibility, high-risk and co-branded decisions.
Customer voice can enter that process through diverse internal reviewers, front-line perspectives, customer advisory groups, quick creative testing, a per-mortem exercise, or an explicitly assigned challenger.
The warning signs identified in Zappi’s post-release testing suggest that a relatively small amount of outside perspective could have surfaced meaningful risk before the ad reached millions of people.
Who is empowered to zoom out?
Before a consequential idea moves forward, leaders should be able to answer:
- Whose perspective is missing from this conversation?
- What are we assuming about how our customers will interpret this?
- Has our definition of the customer grown as our organization has grown?
- Could this decision contradict a value or promise we have publicly made?
- Who owns the risk that exists across functions, partners and audiences?
- Who has both the responsibility and authority to stop the momentum?
The purpose of these questions is not to eliminate creativity or make organizations afraid to act. It is to prevent internal enthusiasm from being mistaken for external alignment.
Explore More: When Customer Signals Don’t Reach Leadership: How Alignment Drift™ Begins
The larger lesson
There are real people affected by this situation: the woman featured in the ad, women who experienced it through the lens of their own lives, employees inside both organizations, retail and media partners, and contestants whose completed television season will not air. This should not be treated as an abstract business case detached from its human consequences.
Nor is the point to pile on to a company already experiencing significant repercussions.
The point is to learn from what the situation reveals.
Good Good may not have stopped listening to its customer. It may have failed to recognize how much larger—and more complex—its customer had become.
That is how customer understanding reaches the end of its shelf life. The organization keeps using an old picture of the people it serves while the reality surrounding the business continues to expand.
Organizations rarely drift because no one cares. Sometimes they drift because everyone becomes so focused on the idea, the opportunity or the execution that no one is left standing far enough away to see the whole picture.
When momentum begins building around an idea in your organization, who is responsible—and genuinely empowered—to zoom out?
How Current Is Your Picture of the Customer?
Customer understanding does not remain accurate on its own.
As customers, markets and organizations change, leaders need a disciplined way to see where customer reality is shaping decisions—and where outdated assumptions may be creating Alignment Drift™.
The Insight-to-Action™ Alignment Index helps leadership teams identify where alignment is strong, where important signals may be getting lost, and where strategy, leadership and execution may be moving apart.
Explore the Insight-to-Action™ Alignment Index
If you would like to see the golf and design work that regularly makes its way to our dinner table, you can find Eion across his social platforms here.