Marketing: Celebrate your differences

The way Randy Bracy sees it, we’re all in this together. The owner of Bracy’s Nursery, a Louisiana-based wholesale grower, spoke at length about marketing ideas during the Nursery Grower Business Coalition. Bracy’s philosophy is that growers should do whatever they can to help their customers sell more plants. That includes drawing up marketing campaigns to create demand for their products.

“If the garden centers don’t sell plants, we don’t sell plants,” he says.

His latest campaign is titled “Declare Your Advantage,” and it is designed to tout the reasons shoppers should buy from independent garden centers as opposed to big-box stores.

“IGCs deal with plants and the gardening aspect of it,” Bracy says. “The box stores deal with everything and [plants are] a sideline to them.”

As the owner of a nursery that sells exclusively to IGCs, Bracy has strong reasons for his preference. But he hadn’t considered using those reasons in a marketing campaign. At least not until he attended a talk at an industry event in which the types of plant consumers were split into three simple groups.

The speaker said a certain percent of the population will buy their plants at a box store no matter what. A certain percentage will buy from an IGC no matter what. And the remainder — about 15 percent of plant purchasers, according to the speaker — that could go either way. Those are the people you should be targeting, Bracy says, because they haven’t made their minds up yet.

So he began to ask the question: “Can we persuade a portion of that 15 percent to start going to IGCs versus box stores to buy their plants because of all the advantages the independents offer them?”

That was the genesis of the campaign. Reach those undecided consumers and show them the advantages of shopping at an IGC. Bracy unveiled the new program at the 2015 Gulf States Expo in Mobile, Ala.
 

Promote your strengths

Bracy’s team developed a series of five posters. Four focused on specific advantages: community, selection, quality and service. Each advantage is explained briefly, along with a quick tagline and a few examples. The fifth poster brings it all together with a checklist, pitting IGCs against major retailers and imploring consumers to make a choice.

IGCs are uniquely positioned in the green-industry marketplace, Bracy says, and consumers want that type of shopping experience. Many shoppers enjoy the fact that their purchases stay in the community – that’s the community advantage.

“You’re dealing with people you go to church with, who live on your street,” Bracy says.

The quality and selection advantages are that IGCs take better care of their plants and offer a wider selection of varieties that are more adaptable to the consumer’s particular area. The service advantage comes into play when customers have questions about a plant. If plants are only part of a retailer’s overall business, its employees may not have the answers that customer needs.

“You’re dealing with people who are actually knowledgeable about the plants,” he says.

The messages are delivered via 24-inch by 36-inch weather-resistant, full-color placards. The point-of-purchase materials encourage retailers to promote their strengths because they are superior to their chain store competitors. Signage asks shoppers to consider the reasons why they should buy from their local IGC.

Jim LaStrapes, the owner of LaStrapes’ Garden Center, started using the Declare Your Advantage program in early April. The Opelousas, La.-based operation is small and LaStrapes likes it that way. There are four permanent employees and no part-timers staffing the garden center, which has 10,000 square feet under a roof and an outside sales yard. He sells “anything and everything garden-related,” from herbs to trees to soil additives. The campaign is tailored to fit IGCs like LaStrapes’ well. In Opelousas, the nearly 300-year-old Louisiana town which bills itself as the zydeco capital of the world, community means a lot.

“It puts that message out to them that their money stays home and that we support the community that supports us,” LaStrapes says. “We know probably 95 percent of our customers by a first name basis. They’re regulars, we’ve either gone to school together or worked together. We’re like a family. They visit with us. We talk about their kids and grandkids.”

LaStrapes set the placards up between the hanging baskets at his garden center, where he says visitors can’t help but notice them, and lets them do their work. “It definitely enhances their experience,” he says.

“It puts us out there, lets them know we’re there to help answer questions and do more than just sell them a plant.”

Sell the benefits

This isn’t the first time Bracy has developed a marketing campaign for his IGC customers. Two years ago, Bracy rolled out the “Sell the Benefits” program to 90 garden centers throughout the Southeast United States.

The thinking behind this program was that too many people see plants as luxury items that they could live without. The Sell the Benefits program was designed to change that way of thinking by focusing on the many ways plants add value.

The five-piece package features full-color 24-inch by 36-inch placards made out of weather-resistant Corflute, a heavy-duty corrugated plastic. This POP collection shows customers the great things plants and landscaping can do. The in-store displays proudly tout research that shows plants increase property values, benefit children, benefit businesses and conserve energy.

For instance, the “Benefits to Children” placard states that children who spend time in a natural environment may have lower stress, greater fitness and concentration. Businesses also benefit from being associated with plants, as shown on the corresponding placard.

Besides drawing more customers in, shoppers will stay longer, buy more and pay higher prices due to higher perceived quality.

“Plants are a necessity, not a luxury,” Bracy says. “When they want to plant that tree on the side of the house, they may realize that 10 years from now they might get some benefits from energy costs.”

It’s too soon to draw any conclusions from the Declare Your Advantage program, and the myriad of factors in play make it difficult to measure whether the Sell the Benefits campaign increased sales for the IGCs that used it, but Bracy believes that the end consumer is starting to realize that plants do add value. That’s a win in the long run.

“It’s essential for us to educate the public,” Bracy says. “Look at it this way: if you go to a grocery store and look at all the toothpaste in there, the one with no marketing behind it always sells for the cheapest price. It’s the bottom end. Those that have some marketing behind them, they get a better price for it.

It’s the same with our plants. Once we educate people that plants are important to use in our daily lives, the value associated with them will increase.”

For more: www.bracys.com