A Proven Winner -- quite literally

In the latest bid to keep a finger on the consumer pulse, the marketing team at Proven Winners recently conducted a national survey to determine which of four ads would be deemed most attractive by their customers.

The winner? Well, it wasn’t the choice company officials were expecting. “B won,” said Proven Winners Marketing Director Marshall Dirks, noting the ad pictured above. “In fact, it received almost half the votes. I was actually hoping A would win. That’s the ad we had chosen to go with before we took the vote to the people. I think this campaign underscores how important it is to listen to your customers.”

The innovative “poll the people” campaign was launched on Oct. 16, when Proven Winners sent an electronic survey to its database of more than 150,000 consumers, asking them to choose which among four prospective ads they found most appealing. As of earlier this week, nearly 8,000 customers had cast votes in the survey, which also included questions about buying habits.

The winning ad features a combination of Proven Winners’ plants – including Snow Princess alyssum, Supertunia Pretty Much Picasso and Sweet Caroline Light Green sweet potato vine – arranged beautifully in an elegant urn. Because of the consumer vote, this ad will anchor the 2011 spring promotional campaign the Sycamore, Illinois-based company will launch in consumer magazines.

Dirks said the residual effect of research of this type is invaluable to his company, which has become a standard bearer for measuring trends. As part of the survey, consumers were asked when they start planning gardening decisions. A whopping 2/3 of the respondents said they plan year-round, while 17 percent said they don’t make advance plans, opting rather to order plants they see and like at garden centers.

Another key bit of data for Proven Winners was the overwhelming response from respondents that they magazines provide most of their gardening inspiration. Hence the ad that will appear in a variety of popular consumer publications – in a manner thousands of consumers have already deemed appealing.

But Dirks said Proven Winners isn’t the only beneficiary of his company’s recent survey. “The key thing from the broad perspective is that growers can know this information ahead of time so they can address consumer demand,” he said. “And retailers can benefit, too, because people will come into the store looking for what they’ve seen in the magazines, and they’ll be better prepared to meet customer expectations.”

Dirks said surveys of this ilk almost always provide unexpected responses – which underscores their worth to him. “One of our biggest surprises from this survey was how many people purchase plants online,” he said. “Over 51 percent said they had purchased plants at some time [using the internet].” Proven Winners, like many retailers, have launched e-commerce ventures, so this news can help them better address customer shopping preferences.

“As an industry we tend to work in a vacuum,” Dirks said. “We [the industry as a whole] haven’t done a very good job of looking at things through the customer’s perspective. That’s why we take our research very seriously. We’re going to spend a million bucks on this campaign. Imagine what would have happened if we ran the wrong ad.”