Character development: making plants the protagonist in your wholesale nursery marketing strategy

When a customer falls in love with that lush, hardy plant off the truck you sent from your nursery, it’s because the plant is an unwitting character in the customer’s own compelling story.

Usually, the story’s narrative centers on some type of personal experience that is actual, remembered or anticipated. When your plant speaks to the customer’s experience by successfully triggering emotion, the story naturally unfolds.

But the journey from seed to sales is a long, arduous one ripe with plot twists and turns. A customer falling in love with the “character” of that lush, hardy plant — well, that’s the epilogue.

Let’s go back to the beginning to find out what happened and where that good marketing idea, which triggered the affair, came from. Because it’s really how you construct the plant’s story that determines whether it will land successfully in the end-user’s landscape or do-it-yourself project or lie forlornly on someone else’s compost pile.

Plant protagonist

Good marketing ideas come from character development. And in an industry where every product has a purpose, who doesn’t want their lush, hardy plant to be the hero of the customer’s story?

Now, we’re not necessarily talking about branding here. Remember, branding defines a company’s identity and values. Marketing is the process of communicating that identity to reach and engage current and potential customers. For growers, that’s telling the stories of plant attributes through plants’ unique characteristics.

If you’ve ever found yourself staring at a blank screen — cursor blinking, begging for words — you’re definitely not alone. Anyone who’s ever marketed plants has at some time or another found themselves wondering how their products can make a compelling statement in a crowded marketplace where choice is everywhere. After all, why should the customer buy Plant A (ours) when Plant B (someone else’s) would be a fine stand-in?

Good marketing ideas don’t often drop from the sky like rain while you’re loading liners into the greenhouse. But by all means, if an idea should drop that way, put down the liner and pull out your notepad.

Rather, developing a good marketing idea is a process. The good news is that the idea often does come from where you are — your greenhouse, your environment, your curiosity and the natural rhythm of the business you already know by heart.

Ornamental plant growers have a powerful advantage most marketers envy — an intimate relationship with their products. You know every stage of your plants’ lives: what they need, when they need it, their habits, how they struggle. You raise them from seeds or cuttings and watch them grow into something beautiful. If that’s not intimate, I don’t know what is.

All photos: Sue Markgraf

Red herrings

But like anything else we get close to, we run the risk of being too close, and that intimate insider knowledge can create red herrings that throw us off the course of effectively telling our character’s story. When that happens, for just a few minutes, take off your grower’s hat.

Walk around. Look at your plants the way your customers do: with excitement, wonder, anticipation, eagerness, awe. Those feelings reflect your plants’ inherent qualities, and they are the structure of character development within your marketing.

Knowing the customer is the prologue to articulating that good marketing idea. Through conversation, get to know what it is about “that plant” that elicits feelings of excitement, anticipation, eagerness and awe.

Your customer, for example, may desire a low-maintenance pollinator landscape, one that is vibrant with bright colors, varying heights and delicate movement. Another may be under pressure to design a serene outdoor environment, with artfully planted herbs and scented flowers, for an overwhelmed client with a need to de-stress at the end of a long workday. And then there’s the person who is frustrated by a blank space in the perennial bed out the dining room window. They simply want a flowering shrub to fill it in.

Three formulas

Notice the italics in each situation. These three formulas drive the sequence of events central to successfully cultivating your plant’s good marketing idea. They are the customer’s: 1.) desire, 2.) need or 3.) want. In fact, at least one of these formulas must always be present to tell your plant’s story — and ultimately cause the customer to fall in love with your character.

The plot thickens through character development. Characters — in this case, plants — are catalysts that drive the customer’s story forward to a satisfying conclusion. Characters’ attributes force them to grow and change through external conflicts, internal struggles and the consequences of their environment. They are reliable — although maybe a little colorful. They are sturdy, strong and hardy through trial and stress.

Beauty is also important, but so are benefits, and good marketing ideas draw on both. In communicating beauty and benefits, you invite a relationship with the customer by meeting them where they are, satisfying the desire, need and want in their own story.

Plants partner with us through the challenges of life by delivering aesthetics and the all-important something else. They inspire comfort through color, stress-relief through aromatherapy, shelter and food for wildlife and clean, healthful environments in which to play, relax and socialize. Dreams become ideas as we gaze at foliage that takes us somewhere other than where we are at the moment.

Inspiring plant marketing tugs at the emotional thread of the season. Spring speaks of renewal and vibrancy. Summer hums with warmth and play. Fall carries abundance and harvest. Winter invites dreams and planning. Through creative marketing, plants celebrate life’s milestones and honor significant relationships.

Novel ideas

Are your customers feeling restless after a long winter? Sell the promise of spring and abundant life. Are they facing the rush of summer? Offer durable, heat-loving champions. Let the natural year do some of the work for you.

But not all of it.

Inspiration for good ideas is in front us in our everyday lives. It is in the culture around us, the interactions we have with others and within plants’ own physical attributes and characteristics.

Among my favorite marketing campaigns are “Hocus Pocus Groundcovers – They Cover Like Magic” (Midwest Groundcovers) and “Runs on Solar Power” (First Edition Shrubs & Trees, Bailey Nurseries). This clever marketing stops me at the plant bench every time because of its implied promises. Ground cover that grows quickly and easily. Shrubs that require little maintenance. Using plants to support common values that can help make life easier and more enjoyable makes perfect sense.

Good marketers are great observers of other industries, in addition to their own. They go full-stop to notice the things of life that capture attention, then borrow those ideas and translate them into their own world. “Runs on Solar Power” is a great example. As Apple co-founder Steve Jobs once said, “Marketing genius is not in invention but in adaptation.”

Nitty-gritty research

I’ve been a marketing professional for more years than I care to count and what I find interesting is that the essential desires, wants and needs of people (for happiness, security and peace, for example) really don’t change, even though our society and products may. Still, nitty-gritty research is relevant.

Learning how people react and what motivates them shapes good marketing campaigns. I once had a marketing professor who gave us the assignment to sit inside O’Hare Airport and people-watch. We were to take notes about everything we saw and heard, and I learned a lot. Mainly, if you listen — really listen — and pay careful attention to customers and what’s happening within the culture around you, marketing ideas present themselves in a myriad of exciting ways.

Fast-forward to my role in public relations several years ago at the Chicago Botanic Garden where the popular “Just One Look” marketing campaign was developed in a very “scientific” way. A colleague and I stood on the entrance bridge one sunny Saturday and wrote down everything visitors said as they entered the garden. “Oh, wow” was the ubiquitous statement and became the primary marketing tool of a highly successful capital campaign.

“But!” I can hear you thinking, “marketing ideas have to be ‘Super Bowl big’ to be ‘really, really good’ — right?”

Nope. That misconception keeps us in the safe zone. It encourages us to keep ruminating and prevents us from expressing our plants’ character in compelling and unique ways. Nor must marketing ideas be super-polished or super-professional.

Rather, marketing ideas should be — super simple. Some of the most effective marketing strategies are joyful, surprising and even a little wild.

Good epilogues

Experimenting with different characterizations, testing new story platforms and trying out diverse approaches is a fun and creative way to discover what truly resonates with your audience — the plant customer. This willingness to experiment enables marketing ideas to evolve and develop fluidity as they adapt in real-time.

Sometimes the fear of trying something new or taking a leap that initially feels far-reaching may keep us from exercising the power of a good marketing idea. The key is to relax. Allow ideas to percolate, simmer — then transform.

In doing this, ideas often speak for themselves. Some of my best ideas come from grabbing a class of cabernet and walking around my own garden.

Of course, not every idea will bloom. Your character may not have the “character” you thought it did and ideas may flop. Some ideas may take longer to execute than you expect. But that’s OK. Good ideas come from trial and error, which likely may lead to the epilogue I mentioned earlier.

As in good storytelling, asking “what if?” is a great way to begin. What if we did this — or that? What if this marketing idea is the right one? What if we tweak the approach this way?

What if our plant characters provide meaning in the life of the customer and become part of their story in a unique and surprising way? Through the telling of their beauty and benefits? The customer will fall in love, right?

Yes. And often? Plant characters make for a really, really good ending.