“How can they know unless someone tells them?” –Romans 10:14
The purpose of promotion.
Marketing is often misunderstood. It is not a facet of business; it is business. When you bring something to the marketplace, you’re marketing. It is simply presenting your goods or services to the world. You have to ask for the business; it will not come to you. Asking is marketing.
There is a natural, inborn value that humans have for plants, just as there is for food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, and countless other things. It would be foolish, however, to assume that this value is strong enough to consistently provoke action. The world will not value plants as much as we would like if we do not tell them why they should.
As an industry, we have successfully relied on the individual efforts of retailers (garden centers) and service providers (landscape companies) to convince the buying public that our product is valuable. The past recession has led many to conclude that these individual efforts are inadequate, or at the very least could be enhanced by a different tactic. At the extreme, this new direction is to shift the power and the message centrally, to a single unified marketing slogan. Instead of thousands of lone voices, there would be one loud voice, speaking for all. As problematic as the issue of funding is, the idea that the industry as a whole would cooperate—to sing the same song in harmony—is perhaps even more of a stretch to imagine.
Are we prepared for that kind of change? Losing money makes you want to change. Being hungry makes you want to find food. Throwing away millions of dollars worth of unsold plants makes you wonder what you could have done to sell them.
Wisely, we all first look internally at our own businesses for the answer to how we can sell more and be more profitable. But when our current retail and service sector customers (and all prospective customers) uniformly want to purchase less and pay less for the product, it leads us to a sense of helplessness to solve the problem on our own. This has led many to say and think, “We should have a national marketing campaign.”
Depending on your philosophical bias, this desire to find an external solution (a savior) is either akin to socialism (take someone else’s money for my benefit) or it is teamwork at is finest (a united effort will benefit all).
In my opinion most of the voices proposing a national marketing campaign are growers, and this makes sense. What they are really saying is that their retail and service sector customers are not doing their jobs well enough. They aren’t upholding their end of the bargain. If the garden centers and landscapers were effectively marketing the manufacturer’s products then they would be selling more at higher prices.
Also, you don’t hear many nurseries with prominent brands clamoring for this. Why? Because these growers don’t want to promote plants in general as much as they want to promote their plants specifically. But the thing is, these growers, by having brands, are addressing the same fundamental problem. They concluded many years ago that the supply chain was doing an inadequate job of representing their plants to the marketplace, so they have taken on some of the responsibility of selling more at higher prices. These large nurseries deserve a lot of credit for their foresight (but also some scrutiny as well).
We will address the question of funding later, for it is where most of the problems with this scheme will be found. Before we get sidetracked by the issue of money, let us define as clearly as we can the reasons why we would want a national, unified message from our industry to the world.
- Purpose: Why have a national marketing campaign?
- Volume: Sell more plants.
We are not content to retreat as an industry, to reconcile ourselves that we will sell less and less every year. The “new normal” should not mean that we slide downhill until enough of us go out of business that the survivors can begin to see slight regrowth.
OpenHort concludes that this is the most logical goal and the easiest to define and understand.
- Margin: Higher price for plants
We are not content to retreat as an industry, to reconcile ourselves that our products and services will be worth less and less each year. We do not want a small price increase. We want to drastically raise the perceived value of our plants, and to charge accordingly.
OpenHort believes that this is a good goal, but secondary to volume. It should be the goal of individual businesses to raise their prices, margins and profitability. (But we’re willing to consider otherwise…)
- New Frontiers: Introduce new generation to plants
The curtain is closing on the generation that we have all relied on to buy our products and services. The time is now, while we can still rely on the Baby Boomers, to prepare for the future. Our primary goal should be to convince Gen Y of the the value of plants. We need to make gardening cool, or—at the very least—something normal to do.
OpenHort believes that our efforts could take a decade or more to really pay off. The focus should be on the demographic that we want to love us in 10-20 years.
- Therapeutic: Make us feel like we’re “doing something”
Let’s be honest, this is a strong reason motivating the call for change. Inaction in the face of challenges is uncomfortable. We want to DO something. We may not be able to prove that this solution will help, or that it will return value on our investment. But we’d sure feel better about the world if we knew that someone was doing something.
OpenHort believes this is a lousy reason to spend millions of dollars.
- Defense: Stave off a challenger
The most successful “industry marketing campaign” in history is worth understanding. The dairy farmers launched the “got milk?” campaign because they were being killed by sodas. They had a clear competitor to defeat, a competitor that went head to head with them on the retail shelf and was able to spend massive amounts in advertising. The situation demanded they do something or die. (I don’t know what the green industry’s direct challenger is for the American consumer’s time, interest and money.)
OpenHort believes we do not have a direct challenger to do battle with. Our enemies are many. We should instead focus on internal, not external, challengers—the fact that we make things so complicated and difficult to grasp for the average person. (In other words, let’s assume that we’re our own worst enemy.)
- Volume: Sell more plants.
(I don’t imagine that this list is complete. What other reasons can you think of FOR a national marketing campaign? Please let me know so that I can include it!)
Before we can really move forward, we must first decide what our goal is, and then we must decide how we will measure to see if we achieve that goal. The measuring will be difficult, I think, but probably necessary to consider before we can begin asking for/demanding investment.
How will we know if we are selling more, or for higher prices, and that it is a direct result of the efforts of the marketing? The Beef Board claims to have research that shows that for every dollar (involuntarily contributed per head of cattle sold) the price of beef is raised $5. How do they know this? How long will the marketing have to prove itself—to take hold?
These are tricky issues, and I am not qualified to answer them. I just know they need to be asked.
In summary, OpenHort proposes that the defining reason for action is to sell more plants, with a particular emphasis on GenY.