What Growth Teams Can Learn From Topgolf About Turning Experiences Into Revenue

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What Growth Teams Can Learn From Topgolf About Turning Experiences Into Revenue

Keyphrase: What Growth Teams Can Learn From Topgolf About Turning Experiences Into Revenue

There was a time when growth meant one thing: get more people into the funnel, faster. Buy the clicks. Scale the ads. Improve conversion rates by inches. Repeat. But the brands creating the most durable revenue today are playing a different game. They are not simply pushing products. They are designing experiences people want to return to, talk about, and share.

That is why Topgolf is such a compelling case study for modern marketers, revenue leaders, and ambitious growth teams. It is not just a sports venue. It is a masterclass in how to blend entertainment, hospitality, technology, social behavior, and smart monetization into a business people actively choose, even when they have countless alternatives.

For growth teams under pressure to increase customer lifetime value, improve brand loyalty, and create more resilient revenue streams, the real lesson is bigger than golf. Topgolf shows what becomes possible when a company stops asking, “How do we sell more?” and starts asking, “How do we create something people never want to leave?”

Why Topgolf Matters in a Conversation About Revenue Growth

On the surface, Topgolf may look like a leisure brand. In reality, it offers one of the clearest examples of experience-led growth in the market. It took an activity that many people perceived as intimidating, time-consuming, weather-dependent, or niche, and turned it into something social, measurable, and easy to enjoy for beginners and enthusiasts alike.

This matters because the same pattern appears across high-performing brands in retail, SaaS, hospitality, healthcare, travel, and B2B services. The fastest-growing businesses are often those that remove friction, elevate emotional connection, and build environments where customers consume more because the experience itself increases willingness to spend.

In Topgolf’s case, the company combines food and beverage sales, gameplay, events, group bookings, brand partnerships, and repeat experiences into one ecosystem. That diversified revenue approach reflects a wider truth: growth is stronger when revenue is layered, not linear.

The evidence behind the model

Topgolf’s rise has been widely documented. Callaway recognized the strategic importance of the business and completed its merger with Topgolf in 2021, creating Topgolf Callaway Brands. The company has also described Topgolf venues as powerful drivers of guest engagement, gameplay revenue, food and beverage spend, and event demand in investor materials and company updates published at Topgolf Callaway Brands.

At the cultural level, Topgolf has become a widely recognized social destination, with major coverage from outlets including CNBC, Forbes, and company-backed reporting on venue expansion and audience growth. The significance is clear: Topgolf is not selling golf alone. It is selling time well spent.

The First Lesson: Remove the Intimidation Barrier

One of the most powerful things Topgolf did was make participation feel easy. Traditional golf can be loaded with perceived barriers: equipment, skill, dress codes, time commitment, cost, etiquette, and uncertainty about whether you belong. Topgolf stripped away much of that anxiety.

For growth teams, this is a fundamental lesson in conversion optimization. Sometimes your biggest growth blocker is not a weak campaign, poor creative, or underperforming landing page. Sometimes it is the emotional friction people feel before they even begin.

Ask the better growth question

What if your market is not resisting your offer because it lacks value? What if people are resisting because they feel unsure, overwhelmed, judged, or underqualified?

Topgolf worked because people did not need to “be golfers” to participate. They only had to be open to having a good time. That adjustment expanded the addressable market significantly.

Growth teams should ask:

• Are we accidentally making our offer feel exclusive when it should feel welcoming?
• Are we overloading first-time users with complexity?
• Can we reframe our product from expert-only to easy-entry?
• Do our onboarding, messaging, and design reduce anxiety or increase it?

Across sectors, this is where high-growth brands often win. They simplify the first step. They lower the perceived risk. They create a clear path to “try it now.”

The Second Lesson: Make the Product Social, Not Solitary

Topgolf transformed an individual skill activity into a shared social experience. That move is commercially brilliant. When people come together, revenue expands naturally. Groups stay longer. They spend more on food, drinks, upgrades, and events. They introduce new people to the brand. And because the memory is collective, it becomes easier to repeat.

This is a lesson many growth teams still underestimate. Products and services often create far more value when they are positioned as social identity tools rather than isolated transactions.

Why social design drives revenue

When a brand becomes part of how people connect, celebrate, compete, or belong, it gains advantages that pure utility-based businesses struggle to match. Utility gets compared on price. Experience gets remembered.

That is one reason the broader experience economy continues to matter. According to exploration from Harvard Business Review’s landmark work on the experience economy, businesses create greater value when they orchestrate memorable events, not just deliver goods or services.

Topgolf is a living version of that principle. People do not go purely to hit golf balls. They go for birthdays, team nights, first dates, work socials, celebrations, and casual nights out. The gameplay is the mechanism. The real product is the memory.

The Third Lesson: Layer Revenue Streams Intelligently

Another standout lesson from Topgolf is that revenue growth becomes more resilient when it is designed across multiple touchpoints. A customer may initially book a bay, but the revenue potential does not stop there. They may also buy food, drinks, premium time slots, host an event, return with colleagues, purchase merchandise, or become a repeat guest.

This creates what many brands need most right now: revenue diversification.

From single transaction to revenue ecosystem

Many businesses still rely too heavily on one moment of monetization. A software company depends on subscriptions alone. A retailer depends on one-off purchases. A service firm depends on project fees. Topgolf demonstrates another way: build an ecosystem where the initial interaction unlocks multiple forms of spend.

That same thinking can translate into many sectors:

• SaaS brands can combine subscriptions, premium onboarding, training, community access, and strategic consulting.
• Retail brands can expand into events, memberships, personalization, and exclusive drops.
• B2B firms can move from one-off delivery to recurring advisory, workshops, and analytics services.
• Hospitality and leisure brands can bundle premium access, loyalty perks, and group packages.

The growth question is simple but powerful: Are you monetizing the full experience, or only the first obvious part of it?

The Fourth Lesson: Build Data Into the Experience

Part of Topgolf’s appeal is that it blends physical activity with technology. Guests receive instant feedback. Scores are tracked. Games are structured. Participation becomes measurable and playful. This matters because data does not just improve function. It improves engagement.

Customers like knowing how they are doing. They like visible progression. They like a sense of achievement, even in light entertainment environments. Smart growth teams understand that data can increase emotional investment, not only operational visibility.

Progress keeps people coming back

In digital products, this principle is already familiar. Streaks, dashboards, milestones, recommendations, and benchmarks are common retention tools. But Topgolf shows how powerful this can be in a real-world environment too.

If people can see progress, compare results, or unlock an improved experience, they are more likely to return. That has obvious implications for customer retention strategies.

Ask yourself:

• Where can customers see progress in your experience?
• What makes improvement visible?
• How can data increase delight instead of feeling clinical?
• Can performance tracking create more repeat behavior?

Growth often improves when data becomes part of the customer story, not just the company dashboard.

The Fifth Lesson: Reduce Dependence on Traditional Marketing by Creating Talk Value

Exceptional experiences generate their own distribution. Topgolf benefits from a form of built-in word of mouth because it is inherently visual, social, and easy to discuss. People post photos, share videos, tag friends, organize return visits, and recommend it as an activity for groups.

That is not an accident. It is an example of what happens when a business creates talk value.

Would people mention your brand without being prompted?

This is one of the most revealing questions growth teams can ask. If your experience disappeared tomorrow, would customers talk about it? Would they miss it? Would they tell others to try it?

Topgolf succeeded in part because it creates moments people naturally want to share. In a crowded marketing environment, that matters hugely. Paid media is important, but organic enthusiasm lowers acquisition costs and increases trust.

According to long-standing research into customer advocacy and word of mouth, recommendations remain one of the most powerful forms of influence. Nielsen has repeatedly reported strong trust in recommendations from people consumers know, and related trust patterns can be explored through industry summaries and consumer trust data at Nielsen.

The Sixth Lesson: Turn Occasional Visits Into Habit Loops

One risk with experience-led businesses is novelty decay. People may come once, enjoy it, then move on. Topgolf’s challenge, like many brands in entertainment and hospitality, is to encourage repeat behavior. That is why habit design matters.

For growth teams, the key lesson is this: a great first experience is not enough. Sustainable revenue comes from making return behavior feel easy, rewarding, and socially relevant.

Repeatability is where profit compounds

Returning customers are typically more valuable, less expensive to reacquire, and more likely to refer others. Topgolf supports repeatability through game variety, group appeal, events, leagues, brand familiarity, and a venue model that supports multiple occasions.

The chart below shows a simplified view of how experience-led growth can compound over time:

The Seventh Lesson: Category Expansion Happens When You Market the Outcome, Not the Original Category

Topgolf did not limit itself to golf lovers. It marketed fun, connection, celebration, accessibility, and entertainment. This allowed it to expand beyond the constraints of its root category.

This is an enormous lesson for any company that feels boxed in by industry assumptions.

What category are you really in?

If you sell software, are you really selling software, or confidence, speed, insight, and reduced complexity? If you run a hospitality brand, are you really selling rooms, or escape, mood, and memorable time together? If you offer professional services, are you really selling deliverables, or momentum, clarity, and growth?

Topgolf succeeded because it understood that customers were not buying “more golf.” They were buying a better way to spend an evening.

When brands define themselves too narrowly, they trap their own growth. When they define themselves around the customer outcome, they open strategic space.

What Brandlab Can Help Growth Teams Do Next

The lesson from Topgolf is not that every business should become an entertainment venue. It is that every business can learn to design for deeper engagement, stronger memory, better monetization, and more powerful repeat behavior.

This is where many internal teams hit a wall. They know growth needs to become more strategic, more customer-centric, and more experience-led, but they are stuck inside channel silos, legacy assumptions, or short-term pressure.

Brandlab can help close that gap.

From campaigns to commercial experiences

Growth today is not just about better ad performance. It is about building a brand and customer journey that earns attention, converts interest, and expands lifetime value. That requires alignment across positioning, messaging, digital experience, content, creative, CRM, retention strategy, and commercial design.

Brandlab can help growth teams:

• Clarify the customer outcome your brand truly owns
• Reduce friction across acquisition and onboarding journeys
• Create stronger experience-led positioning
• Design content that builds authority and demand
• Improve retention and repeat engagement strategies
• Identify new monetization layers beyond the core offer

In a market crowded with forgettable campaigns and increasingly expensive clicks, the winners will be brands that create experiences people value enough to return to.

The Future of Growth Will Belong to Brands That Feel Good to Buy From

Perhaps the biggest insight of all is this: customers are not simply choosing products. They are choosing feelings, stories, environments, shortcuts to belonging, and moments that justify their time and money.

That is why the sentiment behind What Growth Teams Can Learn From Topgolf About Turning Experiences Into Revenue matters so much. It points to a broader shift in how modern revenue is built. The companies that win are not merely easier to buy from. They are more enjoyable to engage with. They create less friction, more meaning, and more occasions for customers to come back.

Topgolf proves that when you combine accessibility, social design, measurable engagement, layered revenue, and memorable brand experience, you can transform a niche activity into a powerful business engine.

Now the question is not whether this applies to your category. The real question is: how much growth are you leaving on the table by treating your customer journey like a transaction instead of an experience?

Ready to Turn More Customer Moments Into Revenue?

If your team is trying to unlock brand growth, customer engagement, and stronger revenue strategy, it may be time to rethink the experience you are creating from first touch to loyal return.

What could your business achieve if customers did not just buy from you, but actively wanted to come back, bring others, and spend more each time?

To explore what that could look like, get in contact with Brandlab.

Call your team together and start the conversation.
Email Brandlab to discuss your growth challenge.
Or simply ask the question that changes everything: what experience are we really selling?