Infinite Discs Blog

 

2021 State of Disc Golf

 

One of the great benefits of being such a large disc golf retail store is that Infinite can carry every brand of disc golf disc that we can get our hands on. In addition to the big name brands that everyone has heard of, Infinite also carries smaller brands, including companies just starting out. Some brands we carry literally have only one mold! We want to provide our customers with as many choices as possible so that we can help you live up to our motto: ‘Throw what you love!’

To help you get to know some of the less popular brands, we have been running a blog series which highlights many of these companies. Check out the most recent post here. In the comments to these blogs, invariably there are people posting that they hadn’t heard of the brand before. Bringing awareness was one of the goals in starting the series.

Which Brands Do We Know?

Brand awareness is also one of the questions we asked in the latest State of Disc Golf survey. While Infinite Discs has sales numbers that tell us which brands and molds are the most popular, the survey digs in a little deeper. We want to know if you’ve even heard of some of the manufacturers. We also want to know how well we know the bigger brands. Let’s check out the results.

In the survey, we listed the brands and asked you to rank how well you know each brand on a scale from 1 (Not aware of the brand) to 5 (I regularly follow this brand). I’ll list each number on the scale and show how each company ranked in the survey.   We will start with the least amount of brand awareness.

Never Hear of That Brand?

 

The chart below shows how each brand was ranked according to the percentage of people who have not heard of that brand.  Less than half a percent of us are not aware of Innova, while over 94% of us are not aware of the brand XCom. For the 2% of us that are not aware of the Infinite Discs line, click here. 😁

Here are the results. The higher on the chart, the less know the brand:

Some of the brands are still rather small and are on the high end of the scale. There are some in the middle that I wonder if people aren’t associating certain molds with the company that produces them. For example, a lot of people have heard of a Wizard, but might not know that the Wizard is a Gateway disc.

Know a Little

 

The next answer in the survey asks if we have at least heard of the company. Just to clarify, while nearly all of us have heard of Innova, this survey question asks if that is the MOST we know about the company. Here are the results:

 

The next option in the survey was to indicate that we at least know a little about the company. Maybe we know their top-selling molds. Or we have a buddy that throws some of their discs. We might even have one of their molds, but don’t know much more than that. Keep in mind this chart, like the last, indicates the most we know of the company. Here is the chart:

 

 

Familiar Disc Golf Brand

 

The next category is that we know enough about a company that we could hold a conversation about them. We know their molds, or at least their most popular molds, and know the flight numbers of those molds. Either we throw or have thrown some of their discs. We might even know some of the pros that throw the brand. While we don’t necessarily keep up with their new releases, we have more than a casual knowledge of the company. This is where there should be a little more separation from brand to brand. The higher on the list, the more well-known the company. Let’s see how they stack up:

 

 

Ask Me Anything About…

 

The final category is for the die-hards. The question asked which brands we like well enough that we follow them. Since a large number of us follow the pros and watch the tournaments, we are exposed to a number of brands and molds. We hear what the top disc golfers throw and we know the molds and flight numbers. We hear about the new releases and are eager to try out the ones that fit our lineup. The higher a brand is on this list, the more well-known they are. Here are the top brands:

 

It will likely not come as a surprise to see the company names that are on the leader board of this category. While some brands are relatively new, these are the names we see sponsoring tournaments or sponsoring pros. If a brand can afford to promote their molds, those are the brands we will be exposed to the most and are more likely to throw. The top two on the list, Innova and Discraft, have been around for decades and have a head start on the newer brands. If you’ve been playing for a long time you probably throw one of the older brands. They sold the molds that the long-time players grew up with.

Most and the Least

 

Just for fun I wanted to look at the first and last categories and see if the graphs looked like the inverse of each other. I was pretty close. Below is a graph showing the best known and the least well known manufacturers. You can see that they are close to mirroring each other.

 

Top Sales

 

In addition to learning about the brands that you know or don’t know, I thought we could take a look at Infinite Discs sales for last year and see how the brands that had the most sales compare with the brands that people are most familiar with. As with any statistic from 2020, the numbers are not what we would have seen had Covid19 not affected disc golf supplies. Here are the top selling brands for 2020. The top ten are very similar to the top ten in the category ‘I Regularly Follow This Brand’:

Here are the top ten in sales and brands that are followed:

 

In YOUR Bag

 

The percentages aren’t going to match perfectly because the survey allowed us to select all of the brands that we follow so those numbers will always be bigger that the total sales. These graphs still give us a decent snapshot of the most well-known brands. And, we can always take a peek inside our bags to see if our knowledge of the different brands translates into filling our bags with those brands. In the survey we asked what brands are in our bags. Here is what we indicated. Let’s see if the graph aligns with the brands we follow. These results show what percentage of us throw what brand:

 

 

Once again, the top 10 or 15 brands are pretty much the same as what we sell and which brands are the most well-known. We’ll see in next year’s State of Disc Golf survey if our blog series affects how many brands we know, and see if that means having more brands in our bag.

For the record, one person indicated that they carry 18 different brands in their bag! That sounds like someone as dedicated to a mixed bag as the person who bags only one brand. Either way, we at Infinite are happy to carry as many brands as we can so you can throw what you love!

Comment below and let us know the top few brands that you know best!