After Months of Losses, Max Homa Wins The New Year With Two Big Sponsor Announcements
Let's see if the changes help his on-course game get back on track.
Law 3 of the iconic business strategy book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing is “The Law of the Mind”, which authors Jack Trout and Al Ries summarized as:
“It’s better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace.”
Who knows whether Max Homa, the US Ryder Cup star, is a disciple of the Trout and Ries philosophy, but one thing is for sure: Max Homa knows a thing or two about marketing.
He especially knows a thing or two about branding.
For well over five years now Homa has had one of the biggest personal brands in golf, and he succeeded in winning the New Year media and attention game that sponsors love so dearly by making two big new announcements, one tying him to Cobra for clubs and Cobra’s parent company Puma for footwear, and the other to Lululemon for apparel.
The announcement brings to an end a long full-stack arrangement with Titleist (and its shoe brand FootJoy), although Homa will continue to use the Titleist Pro V1X ball and will almost certainly retain his trusted Scotty Cameron putter, another piece of equipment from the Titleist stable.
Homa is one of those rare examples in elite sport of someone who was able to build a personal brand first, and then follow that up by becoming exceptional.
Sport at the elite level has long been the ultimate meritocracy.
Typically, it works predictably.
You’re either exceptional and do well on the course, court, track, or field, and then get the commercial and business opportunities on that back of that.
Or you’re not and you don’t.
Because winning is a magnet for attention, those who are exceptional almost always enjoy the most powerful personal brands — and by extension, because these things are tightly bound together, the biggest commercial brands.
But Homa was different. He was able to do it the other way round, building a brand by showing the social media world his personality long before he was challenging at the top of leaderboards.
He turned pro in 2013 and didn’t win his first PGA TOUR event until 2019. By then, he was already well known among the growing subset of golf fans whose viewing experience came at least in part through the lens of Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
And then something interesting happened.
Homa got good.
Real good.
He was outside the top 400 in the Official World Golf Rankings until May 2019, when a win at the Wells Fargo Championship lifted him more than 300 places to 105th. Two years later, in February 2021, he beat Tony Finau in a play-off to win the Genesis Invitational and broke the OWGR Top 50 for the first time.
Good performances kept coming, and he spent more than 14 months in the OWGR Top 10 from February 2023 to April 2024, a period that included his standout performance at the 2023 Ryder Cup when his brilliant 3.5 points out of 5 — complete with fist-pumps and finger-pointing galore — was the only winning record in a struggling US team.
But then came the dip.
A winless 2024 saw him plummet out of the Top 10 and end the year in 41st place in the rankings. Since a T8 place back at the Wells Fargo in May, he has had three missed cuts in 12 tournaments and a best finishing position of T14 at the Nedbank Golf Challenge in South Africa last month, where he was the defending champion.
That drop might not yet be precipitous — ask Jordan Spieth and Jason Day about that — but it was worrying enough for Homa to take some serious affirmative action at season’s end.
Out go the Titleist clubs he’s had in his bag since his early life on Tour and in come a set of Cobras. That is, driver and irons, at least — he has been using different versions of Titleist Scotty Cameron putters for several years, and his quotes in the press release and accompanying Golf Digest piece, while effusive in their praise of the design and feel of the Cobra driver and irons, made no reference to any putter change.
Which makes sense, given that it is his long-range game that has faltered the most. For the first time since 2017 — the worst year of his career — Homa lost strokes off the tee in 2024. In Data Golf’s off the tee (OTT) rankings, of 410 players with data in 2024, Homa was 264th. In 2023 in the same rankings he was 51st.
Something had to give.
The move to change equipment clearly gave Homa the impetus to see what else might be on offer, leading to a new apparel deal too. Replacing Homa’s Titleist / FootJoy clothing comes an agreement with Lululemon, which had some cynics on The Social Media Formerly Known as Twitter asking questions like, “You mean Lululemon is not just for girls?”
As he tees it up at the Plantation Course in Kapalua, Hawaii for The Sentry tournament that kicks off the 2025 PGA TOUR season, Homa will be doing so not only with a new set of clubs and new threads, but new shoes too — the deal with Cobra’s parent company Puma takes him out of the FootJoys he’s worn for years, and which he really seemed to love, at least as recently as this ad on Instagram in November 2023.
Some other cynics — there really are no shortage of them — might suggest that starting the year with not one but two big sponsor announcements (Cobra/Puma and Lululemon) is Homa deciding to cash in on some big sponsor deals now while his name is still big, and thus hedging against the possibility of a continued dip in both form and relevance during 2025.
But every golfer can afford one bad year, and Homa will be hoping he’s just put his behind him.
That said, making what appears to be wholesale changes after a few months in the doldrums could be an overreaction.
On that note, time, as it always does, will tell.
What’s beyond debate, at least for now, is that one bad year notwithstanding, Homa still has plenty of star attraction.
In the promotional material accompanying the TGL launch — the new Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy simulation golf venture which kicks off on primetime TV in February — pride of place on Homa’s page is a quote from Tiger himself which underlines his appeal:
“Max is a rising star who gets better every year. He connects with the fans in such an awesome way as one of golf’s top talents and biggest personalities.”
Personality? 100% beyond debate.
Top talent? Almost certainly, but a few new questions are awaiting answers.
One of the great things about Homa, as evidenced by his openness on social media and in his regular appearances on podcasts such as No Laying Up, has always been his willingness to answer almost any question thrown at him.
In this way, he could say that he was so nervous for his match-saving putt against Matt Fitzpatrick in Ryder Cup singles 16 months ago that:
“my legs were full-blown vibrating, like there were 50 phones tied to my legs and everyone was calling me!”
After winning the valuable sponsorship attention game at the very start of the New Year, Homa will return to the course in Hawaii this week trying to answer some of the most searching questions he’s ever been asked.
The difference is that these questions are not being asked by interviewers in search of a social media sound bite.
And better than anyone, he will know that those answers will not be found in his big personality, but in his ability to stop the slide and get back to some winning ways inside the ropes.