How are brands resonating with customers?
January 1, 2026 by Josiah Zoodsma and Jesse Weisz in Analysis, News
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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 2025 FAR/Ultiworld Fandom Survey series, 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: In this article, the term “manufacturer” is used broadly to refer to disc brands and companies, regardless of whether they actually produce 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:
- There is a new #1 in town! MVP overtakes Innova in average Manufacturer Fandom Score in 2025, and their brand, Axiom, takes the #3 spot surpassing Discraft!
- The two manufacturers with the largest change in rank year-over-year were ThoughtSpace Athletics (improving from 13th to 10th) and Dynamic Discs (falling from 11th to 14th).
- Despite holding the same rank, Prodigy had the fourth largest increase in Manufacturer Fandom Score since 2024, potentially signaling the start of a shift in public perception for a company routinely at the bottom of these rankings.
- Like player fandom, respondents were only asked about manufacturers that they indicated they were familiar with. If interested, here is a link to an overview of the familiarity of disc golf manufacturers.
What contributes to a respondent’s opinion of disc golf manufacturers? Like last year, we asked respondents to indicate how different factors impact their view of disc golf manufacturers.
- Unsurprisingly, the factor that drives manufacturer fandom the most is “The quality of discs they produce.” 94% of respondents indicated that this influences their perception of a manufacturer and 70% indicated it greatly influences their perspective.
- Despite being the fourth highest ranked reason by average, “The touring professional disc golfers they sponsor” was only a contributing factor to ~45% of respondents when determining what manufacturers they support.
Just as we did in the previous article on player fandom, we wanted to take a deeper look into whether older respondents value different things than younger respondents and how new fans of professional disc golf compare to long-time fans.
- While some factors, such as the quality of the discs, are consistent reasons for manufacturer fandom across age groups, others contribute differently.
- For example, “The touring professional disc golfers they sponsor” has a stronger influence on manufacturer fandom among younger respondents. More than 60% of respondents under age 25 indicated that this was an influential factor for them, nearly twice the percentage of respondents aged 56 or older.
- Alternatively, the DGPT and local events that manufacturers sponsor are more influential factors for older respondents.
- Interestingly, most factors being considered were unrelated to when you started following professional disc golf. Indeed, the top driving factors for manufacturer fandom are relatively independent of the professional side of the sport (e.g., quality and variety of discs).
In addition to the Manufacturer Fandom Score, we asked respondents which manufacturer was their favorite.
- Innova was the most selected favorite manufacturer, receiving 22.7% of the responses.
- The Top 6 favorite manufacturers are in the same order as last year, with Kastaplast becoming the first company to move up a spot, passing Dynamic Discs for 7th on this list.
- MVP (15.5%) and Axiom (8.5%) combined to have a higher total score (24.0%) than Innova.
How we separate what constitutes a brand is difficult in an ever-changing landscape of brands and partnerships. Below, we tried to combine these favorite manufacturers into four notable families of brands.
Favorite Disc Manufacturer Grouped
- House of Discs (Latitude 64, Discmania, Kastaplast, Westside Discs, Dynamic Discs) narrowly edged out MVP (MVP, Axiom, Streamline) and Innova (Innova, Infinite Discs, Millennium Discs) for the highest share of favorite manufacturers.
- Interestingly, all three of these groups are within 1.3% of each other and each make up a little less than one-quarter of the market. The Discraft brand (Discraft, DGA, Climo Discs) ranks fourth, approximately 6% less than the top three.
How has your favorite manufacturer changed in the past year?
Change in favorite manufacturer
- The rise of MVP/Axiom continues! These two brands posted the largest increases in “favorite manufacturer” since 2024. Combined, their roughly 4.5% gain exceeds the total increase of all other brands in this metric.
- The Discraft family also trended upward. All three Discraft brands saw gains this year, with Discraft itself increasing by 1.64% and ranking 3rd on this list.
- While it remains the most selected favorite manufacturer, Innova saw the largest year-over-year drop in this metric.
- Dynamic Discs is the only other company to have experienced a decrease of more than 1% since 2024.
This year, we also explicitly asked respondents if their favorite manufacturer had changed since last year. 13.3% of respondents reported switching their favorite manufacturer in the past year, a figure that is higher than the share of respondents who changed their favorite MPO player, but lower than those who changed their favorite FPO player.
We followed up with these 13.3% of respondents to explicitly ask which manufacturer used to be their favorite. This allows us to more accurately see the shifts that are happening in manufacturer fandom. The Top 5 most common moves were:
- Innova fans becoming MVP fans;
- Discraft fans becoming MVP fans;
- Innova fans becoming Discraft fans;
- Innova fans becoming Axiom fans; and,
- Discmania fans becoming Discraft fans.
Next Time
The next two articles in this series will be about disc golf media. You’ll learn which commentators, YouTube channels, Instagram accounts, and podcasts fans like the most. Stay tuned to find out how you compare to the rest of the disc golf community.
- If you are interested in learning more about the team and research goals at First Available Research, click here!
- If you want to read articles from last year’s Fandom Survey, 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 the Fandom Survey’s editor, Karl Lamothe.
Throughout the offseason, we will be publishing more articles showcasing the results of the 2025 Fandom Survey. Here are the articles that have been published so far:
- 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
- How Fans Feel about Disc Golf Media (Part 1)
- How Fans Feel about Disc Golf Media (Part 2)
- The Most Popular Discs
- Disc Golf Purchasing Trends
- Last Questions and Final Thoughts
Links for the 2024, 2023, and 2022 Fandom Series articles can be found here.
