Think things are bad now? You don’t know the half of it. We’re under attack by Zombies!
Times are tough everywhere, but it’s especially bad for the green industry. The worst part is that most of us don’t know why we’re suffering so much. Sure, it’s easy to blame Wall Street greed, Washington incompetence, staggering unemployment and, above all, the massacre in the housing market. But that’s not the real problem.
You better wake up and recognize the enemy we face: Zombies! They’re on the lawn and heading for the house. They’re going to eat our brains!
You think I’m kidding? Allow me to explain.
Even in the midst of the rising tide of the “green movement,” the value of plants is eroding at an alarming rate. This point was brought across to me in an alarming way last week when I sat down at my computer to make a simple web search.
Type the word “plants”: into a Google search bar. Don’t press enter. Look at your screen. Hold on a minute, see that list that pops up? What in the world is that? “Plants vs zombies?”
Does that seem strange to you?
It’s even worse over at YouTube, and before you roll your eyes and say, “YouTube? Who cares? There’s nothing good on YouTube,” maybe you should know that YouTube, bought by Google four years ago for a staggering $1.65 billion, is the second largest search engine in the world, far bigger than both Yahoo and Bing with about 4 billion searches just like the one pictured below every single month.
What you’ll find if you click on “plants vs zombies” is a music video with over 3.8 million views. It’s an advertisement for a video game. You should watch it now in the video player below. (Just click the triangle.)
I spent some time last night looking into this phenomenon. Check out what I’ve found. “Plants vs Zombies” is a computer game that was released in August of 2009, first for PCs and then for the iPod and iPhone. It won the “Game of the Year” award. It’s the #19 best selling app on iTunes. According to the game’s maker, PopCap Games, they sell a copy of their second most popular game, Bejeweled (which is currently #26 at iTunes) once every 4.3 seconds!
And before you rationalize, “Hey, this is just a fad. It will blow over like everything else,” consider this: the game’s popularity has just begun. Don’t you think there will be a marketing push to coincide with Halloween? Then the game will be released for the Nintendo DS in January 2011, which will give it another spike. (As a father of four, I know a little bit about this. There are a lot more kids with a DS than with an iPhone). But watch out, because it’s also not available on the Android yet. That will likely happen some time next Spring. With something like 16,000 Andriod phones sold every day, there’s no telling what kind of explosion the game’s going to have.
Of course, we can then look forward to the inevitable sequal.
“Whatever. It’s just a kid’s game.” You think so? According to PopCap, they’ve received 38 movie deal offers so far. Still don’t get it? Take a look at YouTube. There are six “plants vs zombies” videos with over 1 million views. There are another 12 with over 390,000 views. After that, it trails off a bit…there are 52 other “plants vs zombies” videos with over 100,000 views each! How many videos in total? Just 7,180.
This is staggering. I’ve been trying to make relevant videos all year for our industry that would show plants in a fun, positive way. Thanks to the promotion of Kellee Magge of the ANLA, Sid Raisch of Horticultural Advantage and most of all Chris Beytes of Grower Talks, the best I’ve accomplished is about 1,000 views. And, of course, that’s pretty much an “inside industry” audience. What’s the point in that?
Here’s the sobering truth. Plants are not as relevant or valuable to the marketplace as we think. Far, far from it. A stupid game called “Plants vs Zombies” kills us like we don’t even exist.
All right, hopefully I’ve gotten your attention, so let’s forget about this game for a minute. We all know, from the relative safety of our cozy little nurseries, that “Plants vs Zombies” won’t distract ‘Mrs. Jones’ one bit from buying plants. Okay, I get that. The people buying this game aren’t our target market, right? They’re all probably Gen Y slackers with no disposable income or houses that need landscaping. These aren’t our customers… [Crickets chirpping]
Anyway, the real message, which should be crystal clear, is that there’s a big world out there that doesn’t value our product nearly as much as we’d like to think they do. The lesson to learn is that we, as an industry, not only are not effectively telling our “story” to the world, we don’t even know what story others are telling about us. We see demand for our goods and services fall, and we think, “It’s the economy, stupid.” But that view doesn’t offer any hope. What can you do about the housing market? The downturn in our economy, like a draining river, has only revealed the rocks. When people have to choose more carefully how they will spend their money, they reveal more sharply what they value. The value proposition of plants is really, fundamentally in question. How relevant are we?
We have a lot more to gain by asking “How can we make our product more valued?” than we do by asking “When will the economy finally turn around?”
Think about it for a while. Next week I’ll post what “Plants vs Zombies” and the people playing this game can teach us. And the following week I’ll post some ideas I have to turn the Zombies on the lawn to our benefit. Hey, if you can’t beat’em, join ’em, right?
If you’re impatient and would like to know my plans for the whole “Plants vs Zombies” guerrilla campaign right away, register here on OpenHort.com and I’ll e-mail it to you ASAP. Otherwise, thanks so much for reading all of this! I hope you’ll come back, and most of all, I’d really love to hear what you think!
~Art
@artparkerson on Twitter
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