The Polara ball's penetration in the overall golf ball market is minor.
The Polara first entered the highly competitive, and lucrative, golf ball market in the 1970s.
Thanks to its dominance of the ball market, it controls about 20percentt of the $5 billion golf equipment business.
Because golfers put two to five used golf balls into play for every one new ball they buy, the used golf ball market cuts severely into the sales of manufacturers.
Moreover, bad publicity about Pakistan led China to grab market share with machine-stitched balls: over the next two years, Pakistan's share of the U.S. soccer ball market dropped to 45percentt from 65percentt.
But as George Sine, Titleist's vice president for golf ball marketing, suggested in a separate e-mail message, golfers trying to do a golf ball fitting on themselves should start at the green and move backward to the tee.
Struggling to maintain a tiny 3percentt share of the $1.5 billion worldwide ball market, Taylor Made officials put their own ball to the test in a comparison with Callaway's on a live satellite feed to a news conference at the opening here of the annual P.G.A. Merchandise Show.
When Ely Callaway blatantly announced that his new ERC II driver was illegal, some said that it was but another example of his merchandising brilliance, and that he was trying to make up in driver sales the big losses taken from his company's expensive entry into the golf ball market.
Kelly is less willing to talk about one of those poorly kept golf secrets, that Nike's much-ballyhooed new entry in the hyper-competitive ball market, is, well, not exactly made by Nike but by a competitor, Bridgestone, which makes the Precept ball.
While the golf ball market has shifted toward softer, low compression offerings, MyGolfSpy says this is a market test to see how consumers react to the AVX (which costs the same as the popular Pro-V and Pro-V1, by the way).
