Kingsmill’s small wording change with an important meaning.

Listen, I love golf. And I love to travel. But when it comes to visiting and exploring new places, golf is typically not as high on my list as other things.

Well, two things, to be specific. One of them is a four-year-old, the other is six.

Eventually, I hope that both will love golf as much as I do. But today, they love lots of other things a lot more. Things like swimming, playgrounds, swimming, jumping on beds, swimming, riding bikes, and did I mention swimming?

The Trick
There are a lot of ways to describe what they do within the context of resort marketing. The most common one, however, is activities.

Kids, however, drop the marketing speak and just call it: play. But resorts typically reserve the word “play” for golf. So what do you do?

Well, you could do what Kingsmill does in the screenshot above and call it just like it is: golf is golf and play is play. Now, this won’t work for every resort, but there are three reasons I like this.

#1) Broader Meaning
It doesn’t mean you can’t call golf “play”, it just means that you don’t limit “play” to something done with a club. In fact, when you click on “play” and start scrolling that page…what do you know…golf is listed. It doesn’t hurt the golf message, but gives Kingsmill a change to speak to non-golfers easily as well.

#2) Takes Pressure of Non-Golf
By just calling it “play”, it’s easy for Kingsmill to talk about the simple pleasures – swimming, bike rentals, tennis – without feeling like they need a climbing wall or indoor water park to justify their use of the word “activities”. Sometimes that’s part of a resort’s model. And sometimes it’s not. This helps with the latter.

#3) It’s All You Need
And, interestingly, some fun ways to play are all you need in many cases. We recently visited a resort with some friends from out of town. There were climbing walls and fishing ponds and ropes courses. But guess where our kids spent all of their time? The playground and swimming pool.

I think resorts seriously underestimate the power of a playground in their family-centric marketing materials.

Small Change, Smart Change
So, yeah, it’s a pretty small change. But it’s also a very smart one from Kingsmill.

It gives them a chance to speak the same language kids use and focus on the stuff that kids want to do anyway. Golf may be the biggest selling point, but for everyone in a group that isn’t golfing, this approach makes for a great message.