Consumer reports

Some of the biggest brands in horticulture are pouring resources into uncovering the secrets of their consumers. If you want to know more about your consumer, your first stop should be the U.S. Census. This free tool is the starting point for much of the consumer research that the top horticultural brands are using to make business decisions.

For instance, 14 percent of the U.S. population is over 65 years old. They’re not doing as much gardening as they used to, and spending less on plants as a result. Twenty-three percent of the U.S. population is under 18. They can’t even vote yet, and they’re certainly not concerned with buying plant material. Representatives for three major brands spoke at last month’s Farwest Show about what they’re doing to reach the remaining 63 percent.

Understand your brand

The HGTV HOME Plant Collection’s brand is simple to decipher. “People who love HGTV are the target for our products,” says Randy Hunter, managing director and CEO of the HGTV HOME Plant Collection. HGTV is the No. 1 cable network with upscale women in the 25 to 54 age group. In fact, Hunter also is working to reach millennials with the HGTV HOME Plant Collection brand. Results are encouraging, as Hunter claims a 10 percent increase in that particular audience so far in 2015.

HGTV HOME plant collection benefits from associations with major influencers, like Dr. Allan Armitage and Nancy Fire. Fire is creative director and founder of Design Works International. She specializes in trend presentations, print/color direction, color palettes, and graphics. Hunter says her input is vital in the creation of combination mixes.

Two years ago, HGTV HOME Plant Collection began a private plant trialing program. Dr. Armitage was tabbed as a member of the brand’s plant selection committee. He oversees the genetics evaluation processes for both annuals and perennials under consideration for the Plant Collection, taking into account performance evaluations from growers and consumer gardeners alike.

Plants that are selected for the HGTV HOME collection have to meet several qualifications. They are tested for functionality, they must fit the retail space. They must be easy for the grower and the consumer to have success. Hunter says HGTV HOME plant selections are not always the newest plants.

Photo courtesy of Monrovia

“There are 400 to 500 new plants introduced each year,” he says. “I don’t know how anyone keeps up with them.”

One key to their picks is finding plants that are not oversold in the market.

Trialing new plants is vital, of course, but still wasted effort if you don’t market them to the consumer.

And what truly sets HGTV apart from other brands is the synergy with its big brother, the cable TV network. There are plenty of opportunities to take advantage of such a massive platform, and Hunter tries to utilize as many as possible. Incorporating design trends from HGTV experts is a major part of the company’s strategy.

“Understand your consumer, and develop products they want,” Hunter says. “Then test and trial products for performance and function.”

From there, the marketing work truly kicks in. Engage with consumers where they consume media. Whether that is through trade magazines or consumer magazines, TV or digital ads, you need to let them know you exist — your brand depends on it.

Photo courtesy of HGTV HOME Plant Collection

Understanding consumer buying

Jonathan Pedersen, director of business development with Monrovia Nursery Co., recently took an in-depth look at those consumers. The California-based grower works with breeders and plant hunters around the world to acquire, trial and promote new plants. Monrovia wanted to learn more about what drives its business. So it began studying the demographics of consumers more closely, looking for clues to the purchasing puzzle and opportunities to reach beyond its typical consumer base.

“Our product is not in as many households as we think,” he says. “People aren’t putting in plants like they used to.”

Citing his company’s research, Pedersen says the green industry's market penetration into these households has decreased every year since 2002. Last year, 42 percent of households bought some sort of plant. That leaves 58 percent that did not.

Monrovia decided to cut back on its usual advertising efforts in 2014 and allocated that money in an unusual way: a consumer research survey dedicated to figuring out where, how and why consumers buy plants. The company picked six cities, and gave 50 people in each city $300 to spend on plants. Then, they tracked the participants’ shopping activities, recording their observations in a stunning 6,000 hours of video.

When parsing the results of the 2014 study, Monrovia found several common threads across ethnic, age and geographic groups. The company used those common threads to separate the participants into these four categories.

• Practical: These consumers comprise the largest group, representing about 45.9 percent of the surveyed shoppers, and they’re generally outcome-oriented and want plants that are easy to maintain.
• Dedicated: This group represents about 25.8 percent of shoppers and is basically the lifeblood of the nursery industry. They are knowledge seekers who search for the new and unique. However, dedicated gardeners are more likely to buy smaller, less expensive plants and then cultivate them.
• Zen: Representing about 15.8 percent of shoppers, this group tends to be younger and less price-conscious. They are more impulsive buyers and see gardening as a way to reconnect with the earth. They’re also more concerned about pollinators and neonicotinoid pesticides.
• Apprehensive: This segment represents the 12.5 percent of consumers who are afraid of failure and don’t enjoy gardening but feel social pressure to have at least some ornamental plants.

“At Monrovia, we’ve been firmly in the Dedicated Gardener group for the last 20 years,” Pedersen says. “We want to reach out to the other groups.”

Well, except the Apprehensive gardeners, who Pedersen says are “not our target.”

The Zen Gardening group, in particular, has been a target due to its spending behavior and age. Dedicated Gardeners are mostly over 45, whereas most categorized in the Zen Gardener group are under 40.

Monrovia is going after these other groups by looking at other distribution channels, new usage occasions, ways to stimulate demand, and creating new claims and benefits.

Where do these new claims come from? Well, Pedersen says it's mostly a matter of coming up with different ways to say the same thing. A claim that resonates with a 55-year-old may fall flat with a 30-year-old, and vice versa.

“One message does not fit all,” he says.

After poring through the weeks of video, the No. 1 takeaway is that plants were seen as too complicated. Shoppers were overwhelmed not only by garden center workers whose explanations, though well-meaning, went straight over the heads of the shoppers who were not looking for a horticulture lesson.

Monrovia is acting on this information by changing its tags and labels to rely more heavily on icons that describe plant features like watering guidelines and sun requirements, instead of lengthy written descriptions.

The company has also ramped up its social media presence in an attempt to reach millennials. Pedersen hired a social media professional who has increased Monrovia’s social media precence by an unfathomable 7,300 percent. 9,500 Twitter followers and nearly 69,000 likes on Facebook. Five years ago, Monrovia barely had 100 Facebook likes and 500 Twitter followers.

“We need to be more fun, lively, digital and social,” Pedersen says.

Photo courtesy of HGTV HOME Plant Collection

The times they are a-changin’

Marshall Dirks, director of marketing for Proven Winners, has been there since the beginning of the brand. One of his duties was naming all of the plants. He was PW’s second employee, so there was no one else to do it.

So he browsed makeup counters and paint aisles, pulled all the tabs for red, blue and purple colors writing down color names. That was how Proven Winners started naming its plants. Fortunately, Dirks says, the brand hired someone pretty quick to take that job. And there’s a good reason they picked a woman for the position.

Dirks says 83 percent of PW products are purchased by women. If women are the predominant buyer, it only makes sense that women are the predominant voice in making that decision.

That doesn’t mean just naming plants. It’s important in other ways as well, like color preference.

Photo courtesy of Walters Gardens

“For 15 years we’ve been asking them ‘what’s the No.1 color?’ Every year I do this, and every year men always say red. I could walk into many greenhouses and retailers in June and see if a man was the predominant flower buyer or a female, because there’s a lot of red geraniums left over. And red petunias.”

PW’s research shows that pink and purple flowers are more attractive to the women who are actually buying the plants at the end of the line.

The next consumer project PW was involved with was an eye-tracking study to test what people were actually looking at on a PW billboard. The name of the plant, pink/purple photos, signage and more were measured in the study, and the results showed that consumers’ eyes are drawn right to the center of the flower, right after reading the name. In many cases, they didn’t even see the container or the rest of the plant. Proven Winners is acting on the results, and prioritizing the center of the flower and its habit.

“When consumers are evaluating the health of flower, they’re looking at the center,” Dirks says. “If we have a flower that lays over on the center, it’s dropped from our program. It’s an eyesore.”

Shifting demographics have changed the way the company makes decisions. For example, Proven Winners’ business doubled since the brand began selling directly through its website. Assigning an appropriate value on its consumers’ voices is one way the brand aims to increase customer satisfaction.