Do player sponsorships drive disc loyalties?
December 16, 2024 by Josiah Zoodsma and Jesse Weisz in Analysis, News with 0 comments
How does the disc golf community view disc golf manufacturers? What factors drive the support or avoidance of specific brands in disc golf? This article, the fourth of the 2024 FAR/Ultiworld Fandom Survey, dives into these topics. If you would like to learn more about the survey and the demographics of the respondents, please read this accompanying article.
Note: Throughout this article, we use the term “manufacturer” loosely to describe all popular companies and disc brands, regardless of whether a specific company actually manufactures the discs that bear their name.
Similar to how survey respondents were asked to rate their player fandom, we asked respondents, on a scale from 0 to 10, “What is your overall opinion of the following manufacturers?” The average results across 20 manufacturers (i.e., Manufacturer Fandom Score) are shown below:
- Innova secured the top spot this year, garnering an average Manufacturer Fandom Score of 7.87, surpassing MVP/Axiom, who were the top manufacturer in 2023.
- Lone Star and Prodigy were the two lowest rated manufacturers for the second straight year.
- Like player fandom, respondents were only asked about manufacturers they indicated they were familiar with. An overview of the familiarity of disc golf manufacturers can be found here:
However, as outlined in an earlier article in the series, average Fandom Scores often mask additional storylines. Here, we show the distribution of responses for all 20 manufacturers.
Manufacturer Fandom Score Distribution
- Innova simultaneously has the most respondents giving them a 10/10 in Manufacturer Fandom Score and the fewest respondents giving them below a 5.
- Many of the smaller, lesser-known companies, such as RPM and Mint, saw a disproportionate number of 5s; nearly half of the respondents gave these two companies a 5 out of 10, likely indicating they have little to no exposure to their discs despite being familiar with the company.
What contributes to a respondent’s opinion of disc golf manufacturers? This year, we asked respondents to indicate how much nine different factors impact how they view disc golf manufacturers.
Factors in Opinions of Manufacturer
- Unsurprisingly, “the quality of the discs they produce” was the most important factor driving fandom of manufacturers, as this is likely where the majority of disc golf fans intersect with these companies. Over 75% of respondents indicated that the quality of the discs contributes greatly (5 out of 5) to their fandom of manufacturers. Coming in as the second most important factor was disc variety.
- A manufacturer’s brand and style was more influential to a respondent’s Manufacturer Fandom Score than the professional players they sponsor. This was true despite nearly 60% of respondents being DGN subscribers.
- Sponsorship of professional players was rated as contributing more to fandom than sponsoring local players. Interestingly, the reverse was true for events, where sponsoring local events contributes more than sponsoring DGPT events.
Just as we had done previously with values impacting player fandom, we can determine which of the 20 manufacturers has their fandom most driven by each of the contributing factors, both positively and negatively. Below, we list which manufacturer had their fandom most positively or negatively driven by each factor.
How do you read this table? In the first row, Axiom is listed as the company where “The quality of discs they produce” most positively drives the fandom. This means that the more a respondent valued the quality of discs, the greater their fandom of Axiom was, on average. Conversely, the more a respondent valued disc quality, the lower their fandom of Prodigy was.
In addition to Fandom Score, we asked respondents who their favorite manufacturer was.
Percentage Favorite Manufacturer
- Just as in 2023, Innova holds the top spot, with more than 25% of respondents indicating they are their favorite manufacturer.
- This year, we separated the brands MVP, Axiom, and Streamline in our survey. Discraft was the second most favorite manufacturer, but would fall to third behind the summed total of MVP, Axiom, and Streamline.
- Latitude 64 was the most favored company from the House of Discs family of manufacturers.
Which companies have seen the greatest change in favoritism since 2023?
Change in Favorite Manufacturer
- Innova and Latitude 64 were the only two companies to see more than a 1% bump in the percentage of respondents indicating that they were their preferred manufacturer.
- Despite Discraft being second highest in favorite manufacturer, they saw the greatest year-over-year decline.
- Overall, changes in Fandom Score between 2023 and 2024 were relatively low and likely reflect a combination of (1) real changes in the fandom of disc golf fans and (2) differences in the survey population between the two years.
Despite having the highest Manufacturer Fandom Score and being the most favored brand, it is not entirely positive news for Innova. We analyzed who the favorite manufacturer of respondents was based on when they began playing disc golf. We divided the respondents into: post-pandemic boom (2022-2024), discovered during the pandemic (2019-2021), early-DGPT (2015-2018), pre-DGPT (2000-2014), and pre-2000. Each of these groups contained at least 700 respondents.
Started in sport vs Fav manufacturer
- For each group, the more recently a player began playing disc golf, the less likely they were to select Innova as their favorite. For respondents who started playing disc golf before 2000, over 40% identified Innova as their favorite manufacturer! Among those who only picked up the sport since 2022, the number shrank to under 20%. This is in contrast to MVP/Axiom who in this newest set of disc golfers has 27.9% of players indicating they were their favorite.
- In addition to MVP/Axiom, other manufacturers that saw an increase in favoritism among newer fans included Clash, Kastaplast, and Trash Panda.
- Discmania (peaking in 2015-2018 group) and Discraft (peaking in 2019-2021 group) both had interesting distributions with neither the newest or longest tenured players having the greatest proportion of favoritism.
One of the more interesting follow-up questions of a respondent’s favorite manufacturer is how it intersects with a respondent’s favorite player. Here, we generated interactive charts so you can look at this intersection of favoritism. The chart will initially show all manufacturers, but select different manufacturers from the drop-down menu to view them individually.
MPO Fav player vs Fav manufacturer
How do you read this chart? Select “Discraft” from the drop-down menu. The value of 40.1% for Paul McBeth indicates that, of respondents whose favorite player is Paul McBeth, 40.1% of them have Discraft as their favorite manufacturer.
- There are seven Discraft-sponsored players in this list. Among all players in this list, those seven players see the highest percentage of Discraft as their fan’s favorite manufacturer.
- There is clearly a link between player sponsorships and manufacturers, but it varies across players. For example, only 10% of Isaac Robinson’s fans have their favorite manufacturer as Prodigy, while over 50% of Nate Sexton’s fans have their favorite manufacturer as Innova.
We produced the same graph for FPO to look at the intersection of manufacturer and player fandom. Statements such as, “Discraft is the favorite manufacturer of 29.8% of respondents whose favorite player is Paige Pierce” can be made using this format of analysis.
FPO Fav player vs Fav manufacturer
The above graphs show the breakdown of favorite manufacturers for respondents who favor specific players. Below, we show the reverse of this: What is the breakdown of favorite players for respondents who favor a specific manufacturer. Statements like, “Calvin Heimburg is the favorite player of 28.6% of respondents whose favorite manufacturer is Innova” can be made using these graphs.
If you are interested in seeing how manufacturer Fandom Score or favoritism intersects with any other questions in the survey, feel free to let us know using the links below! In the next article in the series, we will dive into disc purchasing! How similar do you think the discs in your bag are to the rest of the disc golf community? Why do we buy the discs that we do? All of this and more, coming soon.
- If you are interested in learning more about the team and research goals at First Available Research, click here!
- If you want to be notified of the publication of future articles in this series and/or want to take future disc golf surveys from our group, click here!
- If you have any questions, comments or mailbag topics for future articles, submit them here!
Special thanks to Lauren Campbell, who was instrumental in developing our research plan and assisting with survey design. Also, thanks go out to the Fandom Survey’s editor, Karl Lamothe.
Please see the full series of 2024 articles by following these links:
- The Survey Itself & Who Took It
- Which Pros Do We Root For and Against
- What Drives Fans to Root for Certain Players?
- How Fans Feel about Disc Manufacturers
Links for the 2023 and 2022 Fandom Series articles can be found here.
Bonus Content for 2024 Fandom Survey: How Fans Feel about Disc Manufacturers is only available to Ultiworld Subscribers
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