Make your message heard

We grow it, we do not market it. We’re selling to the retailer, not the end consumer. Marketing is not our job.

If you’re a plant grower, declarations such as these may have crossed your lips at some point during your career. Why should you spend money on marketing your product directly to the end consumer when you’re selling it to retailers? It’s their job to spend the money to re-sell it successfully to the home gardener, landscaper or produce vendor.

Another familiar declaration is, “Adapt or die.”

Comfort zone or danger zone?

When you’ve carved out a comfortable niche for yourself in your business or your job, and things work very well for a time, it’s easy to develop a sense of entitlement to that position. Why change when what you’ve been doing has worked just fine in the past? That attitude is fine as long as surrounding circumstances don’t change. However, neither the green industry nor our customers are static and change is happening at a quickening pace.

While the thought of sticking strictly to growing and production is seductive, a production-only approach may not help your business thrive in the future. Investing in your own marketing directed at both your retailers and end consumers is probably in your best interest.

“We have historically thought focusing on quality was all the marketing we needed,” said Paul Westervelt, annual and perennial production manager at Saunders Brothers, Inc. in Piney River, Va. “Send your best stuff all the time and let everything else work itself out. We sell out, so it’s hard to know what may have been possible with more of a marketing push.”

But Saunders Brothers did experiment with a marketing push for its boxwood product.

While Westervelt wasn’t necessarily taking a formal or organized approach to marketing boxwood to the consumer, they ended up generating a lot of public demand by creating the National Boxwood Trials and publishing online resources and printed guides for boxwood enthusiasts around the country during the ’90s. Those efforts in turn created demand for the owners Robert and Paul Saunders to offer talks on boxwood around their region. Boxwood is now the Saunders Brothers’ signature plant. Sounds like good strategic B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing to me.

Who’s really buying?

It’s not rocket science: Without customers, there is no business. And while custom dictates that retailers are your end customer, there are many good arguments to be made that the end user is the customer we all really share. If you aren’t tailoring your products and promotions to better suit the end user’s wants and needs, it makes the retailer’s job that much harder. When their sales suffer, so do yours when it’s time for them to place new orders ... or not.

Think of it like a relay race: Each runner must do his or her part to get the entire team to victory.

Depending on IGCs or mass merchants to determine your sales and profit is like backing off the race right before you reach the finish line. Your stretch of the race used to require you to grow and deliver good looking plants to your retailers when they needed them. That was enough. Today’s market and customer may require you to take a few extra steps to enable your retailers to cross the finish line a winner. As a grower, your retailers now expect you to help them attract customers and add value to your product with enhanced packaging, labeling and good prices.

Take the wheel

Fair or not, the reality is that your retailers probably aren’t committing the kind of cash or effort necessary to market and advertise your product to your satisfaction. If you’ve been phased out by a mass merchant you once relied heavily upon for bulk sales, then you may have no choice but to find savvy new ways to ensure new sales through marketing directly to the consumer.

Ultimately, it’s your brand; you’ve invested a lot of cash, blood, sweat and at least a few tears into it. Putting the ultimate fate of its success in the hands of someone else seems unthinkable after all that effort.

To put it bluntly, many retailers simply aren’t giving growers a choice anymore of whether or not to engage in B2C marketing. “We were going to die unless we reached out directly to end consumers,” says Lloyd Traven of Peace Tree Farm in Kintnersville, Pa. Traven admits the business was experiencing some tough times a few years back and wasn’t making headway with its IGC buyers. “Frankly, we were getting bottle-necked by the retail buyers,” Traven says.

The hurdles to communicating with consumers and reaching goals with retail buyers led Peace Tree Farm to start talking and marketing directly to the end users. They now participate heavily in the Philadelphia Flower Show, hold down booths at the Philadelphia Farm and Food Fest and give public talks in their region. They also host public tours and events at their farm and engage directly with customers through social media.

To strengthen the Peace Tree Farm brand recognition, they are also are creating their own in-house branded plant lines specifically to appeal to the end consumer: One Earth Edibles, Garden Geek Collection and a new line of more “challenging” vegetable varieties called Gourmet Edibles.

Who’s the target?

As a grower, it’s probable that you have several ideal customer profiles you need to flesh out and target. Your ideal broker/buyer, your ideal retailer and your ideal end user. Ultimately, all three are tied together hand-in-hand. Getting to know your ideal end user better will require spending some face time with your ideal buyers and retailers to see what they need from you in order to better attract and serve the shopper.

While benefits to the end user will of course be the common marketing theme, your collateral, communication, engagement and communication for each target will need to be customized based on those customers’ needs, wants and what they value in a product.

One good example of a grower-produced marketing piece is the new Terra Nova Garden Decorating Guide. It’s a handy, color-blocked, wheel-shaped reference tool created to educate brokers, growers, retailers and landscapers about the nursery’s key varieties. While the piece is intended as a B2B (business-to-business) wholesale marketing tool, its basis is relevant and useful to the end user. Today’s garden customer tends to buy by color, rather than a specific variety, so it only makes sense that the plants be marketed how they want to buy them.

“A key goal of the guide is to present Terra Nova Nurseries’ genetics in an innovative format that easily demonstrates and describes each variety’s profile, habit, traits, zone range, exposure, and other resourceful information,” says Nathan Lamkey, director of sales and marketing and assistant general manager with Terra Nova Nurseries. “In a clear sense, gardening is decorating; we believe the guide will help nurture this concept.”

Got game?

If you don’t currently have a marketing plan or strategy, don’t beat yourself up; you’re definitely not alone. Now is a good time to gather up your goals and get to work on a plan. Defining — or redefining — your brand and your ideal customers is the best place to start.

Know that marketing and advertising efforts are real work and they require staffing and a budget to back them up. Taking the reins of your B2B and B2C marketing will impact your operating budget. If you haven’t raised your prices in a while, you may need to do so in order to balance some of the cost of your new efforts.

To each their own

Now, if you are satisfied with your sales volume and bottom line, then marketing directly to consumers may not be something you need to do at the moment. Every business and local market is unique and you should evaluate what actions will have the impact on your goals.