QR Codes

The QR code is a high-tech graphic (also called a two-dimensional code) popping up on all types of marketing real estate – posters, brochures, business cards – and on tags and point-of-purchase materials in the ornamental plant world.

Any smart phone user who downloads a free QR reader app can aim their phone at a code and receive product information. And there are some 51 million smart phone users, according to Mobile Web Marketing Solutions. The QR code (QR stands for quick response) sends the consumer to a website, where, in terms of garden consumers, people can find plant care information, photos, planting instructions, lists of companion plants, a hardiness map or garden designs.

Green industry adopters
Silver Vase Nursery in Homestead, Fla., just released new tags in March – all equipped with QR codes, said Marcella Lucio-Chinchilla, marketing director at Silver Vase.

“We’re trying to be more proactive in regards to responses from the end consumer,” she said. “We want to be more informative to the consumer so our product will have better sell-through at the retail level.”

Having the grower’s website on the tag is not enough, she said.

“This is more instant. And not every code goes to the same website,” she said.

One website features details on Silver Vase’s Garden collection -- orchids and bromeliads potted together.

“Consumers will learn why those two types of plants were put together, how to care for them and settings to place them in. Our photos aren’t just plants on a greenhouse bench, they’re lifestyle photographs that will inspire consumers,” she said.

Silver Vase introduced the first blue orchid in January, which has created a lot of buzz in the market. The QR code on the Blue Mystique tag takes consumers to a site that tells the story of how it was discovered – cool facts, but ones that don’t fit on a tag.

“Plants with these new tags and the QR codes are being shipped to retailers just in time for Easter and Mother’s Day sales,” she said.

Limitless information
Hort Couture, which may have been the first plant company to offer the technology, launched its QR coded tags at the California Spring Trials in 2010. The company has QR codes on all of its Culinary Couture tags in the market this spring, said Hort Couture founder Jim Monroe.

“It makes a plant tag the size of a novel,” he said. “It takes a tag that can handle about 300 characters and expands that to a limitless amount of information.”

Hort Couture uses the mobile platform of 10-20 Media’s Garden Pilot with its codes.

“Being on this platform provides limitless information to the end consumer about our varieties,” he said. “And this is on a mobile platform, so it is interactive – not like a traditional landing page that users have to try to navigate on a phone.”

It’s still a new technology that’s not yet reached its potential.

“We have created posters to show the consumer how to use the codes and their phones,” he said. “I think this will be a three-year project for the acceptance of the technology and the content development from our end to really have a product that is understood and executed successfully at retail.”

Monroe envisions using the QR codes for virtual planting instructions that allow the consumer to bookmark a page and have video instruction, as opposed to the traditional planting instructions included on most tags, he said.

For more:   Silver Vase, (800) 872-6586; www.silvervase.com; Hort Couture, (866) 955-4678; www.hortcoutureplants.com.