Signal from Sam Parham - trend translator, content engine guy.

The Callaway ad turned up in my feed last week and I watched it twice. Co-branded driver with Good Good, and one of their founders shoves a woman to the ground for reaching into his bag.

I assumed it would get pulled. It was gone inside a day, and GG apologised for it that same weekend. Callaway's CEO wrote his own letter on the Tuesday, and confirmed Callaway had approved the ad before it went up.

Thursday is the part I didn't see coming. Callaway ended the relationship entirely, effective immediately, and put $1 million behind organisations working to prevent violence against women.

I'll give you my opinion on how it got handled, then get out of the way, because it's the least useful thing in this email.

The apology I understand. Ending a whole partnership by Thursday, over an ad your own team signed off on, is a separate decision, and that's the one I'd argue with.

Nobody gets better from being deleted. They get careful.

The next twenty ideas through that door get killed by somebody who doesn't want to be the person who approved the last one, and you end up with a brand that makes adverts nobody remembers.

The version where anyone learns anything, is somebody sitting down with the people who made it and working out how it got that far. Then mapping out the arc from there.

Shutting the whole thing down just buys you a faster press release. It feeds cancel culture instead of feeding real change.

Anyway. My take and yours are worth about the same here. There's a question nobody asked in that room, and that part isn't an opinion.

Good Good exists because of one belief: golf is stuffy, exclusive, and takes itself far too seriously.

Plenty of people hold that belief. It's true enough to be useful, and going straight at it is most of the reason they've grown as fast as they have.

Going at something is the point, by the way. You can’t stand for without standing against. An account that isn't arguing with anything is wallpaper, and nobody has ever followed wallpaper.

GG were right to pick that fight, right to be rude about it, and they'd be nowhere without it.

Look at what they'd been picking a fight with, though. Dress codes. Clubhouse rules. Members-only tee times and the bloke who pulls you up for wearing the wrong shorts.

You can be as rude as you like about a dress code, because a dress code has no feelings and no friends.

Avis built a brand on being second best to Hertz. Dollar Shave Club built one on razors being a rip-off. Nobody took a punch either time.

Then the ad swung at a woman.

Nobody wrote it down that way, assumedly. On the page it's a joke about a bloke being precious over his new driver.

And she isn't an actress or a stranger. She's Alexis Miestowski, a professional golfer on the Epson Tour who works with GG. Everyone in that room knew her, which I'd bet is a big part of why it sailed through.

None of that travels. In the feed she's a woman who reached for a club and got put on the floor for it. In that moment, she’s a stand-in for a lot more women than herself.

On paper the enemy was still golf's stuffiness. On camera it was women.

Whether anybody set out to make that swap is the argument everyone's having this week, and it's a fair argument to have.

The rage is no shock. What’s surprising is the brand team, the legal team and the entire sign-off process, that failed to ask who’s actually takes the punch here… and the fall-out that’ll come with getting the answer wrong.

Two questions, ten seconds.

Someone in our community reckons it did get asked, and the answer was yes.

His read: aimed at the 25 to 35 year old men who actually buy the clubs, notoriety in an audience that had never heard of either brand, then an apology and a mistakes-were-made as the exit. Deliberate all the way down.

Maybe. I've watched brands do worse on purpose. It doesn't change a word of what I just said, though.

If it was deliberate, somebody still had to ask who takes the punch and then decide they were happy with the answer.

Accident or strategy, same question, and it's the only part of this you can use on Monday, when it comes to growing your own personal brand or e-commerce brand.

I said before that if you stand for something, you stand against another thing, too.

So what’s the belief you’re going up against?

If you're any good at this - building a recognizable brand - you're already arguing against the same one belief every week, whether you've written it down or not.

If you’re new to this: find that belief, throw a punch at it, and see who feels it. In your head, first.

Somebody is holding every belief you argue with, so asking whether a person is involved doesn’t tell you anything.

Whether you swing at a belief, or try a softer approach, comes down to one thing: is the belief about the world around them, or about them?

Nobody takes the punch when the belief is about a price, a product, a tool, or a rule your industry hasn't questioned since 1998.

Go at it. Hard, funny, as unfair as you can get away with. A pricing model has never once felt humiliated.

People take the punch when the belief becomes about how good they are, how late they've left it, or what they're worth.

Swing there and you hit your buyer, or you hit a group standing next to them. Callaway hit women, who were never the ones buying that driver. Sometimes, that’s the price brands are willing to pay. Alienate one group to bring another closer. It could well be the strategy at play here.

Every strategy has a consequence. This one cost them the partnership inside a week.

If you're going after a group of people, make sure that group is the one you're selling to. Even then, you don't attack them.

You hand them permission to put the old belief down and pick up a better one. Or you say the thing they've felt for years and never been allowed to say out loud. Either way, you break the belief and leave the person standing.

So when you swing at your Invisible Enemy, who takes the punch? Nobody, your buyer, or a group who were never going to buy from you anyway?

Scroll down for your homework if you're not sure. Or hit reply with your answer.

Until next time,

Co-founder, 1DS Collective

ON YOUTUBE

Steal This 5-Layer Personal Branding Framework, on my channel. The filter layer is the one that matters here: getting specific about who you're for. Same decision as this email, approached from the other side.

ONE TO READ

CNN's write-up, if you missed the week. Worth it for the timeline more than the outrage: approved, posted, pulled, apologised for, then severed, inside a week.

THIS WEEK

Write the belief your content argues against, in one sentence.
Swing at it and answer one question: who or what takes the punch?

Then read your last three posts and check you wrote them the right way round. Most people find one they'd redo.

P.S.

We ran a whole session on this inside AuthorityOS just this week: how to find the belief you're up against, and which of the five ways to break it you use once you know who takes the punch. Recording's in there, so is the reference sheet.

It's $27 a month locked for life for the first 100 members, then $197.