In 1963, President John F. Kennedy said, "Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future."
(The following is a transcribed version of the PowerPoint slides Robert presented at The Fall Event 2019 during his Cheekwood Challenge.) Following The Fall Event 2019 and Robert's Cheekwood Challenge, several Group Owners have shared their experience in working toward a more balanced approach to their marketing efforts. Be sure to see Group Clients Weigh-In at the bottom of this blog post for more. Joey Bokar - Kerby's Nursery, JD Boone - Dothan Nurseries, Cameron Rees - Skinner Garden Store, and Liz Lark-Riley - Rockledge Gardens.
Before The Fall Event 2019, Danny mentioned having an open mic session to address the peaks and valleys garden centers face. I told him I had an idea that might help explain why this happens.
Attention Group Owners-Managers:A few weeks back we had a lengthy GroupEs eList discussion about e-marketing and especially email newsletters. In the middle of the conversation, Robert Hendrickson said this is an indication we need to reach out to Michael Katz at Blue Penguin Development for his coaching skills. Michael is one of the best at creating effective email newsletters. He has been a featured speaker at multiple past Fall Events and some of you no doubt are on his email list today. But we know many of you are not. I spoke to Michael to discuss our needs and he has put together a special offer, just for The Group. Here's details:
[Danny] This past week, while we were at the Farwest Show, Proven Winners' Jessica DeGraaf shared with me a new promotional support program they are introducing for 2020. You may remember they offered a special program this past spring where our centers could participate in a customized video series by Garden Answer's Laura and Aaron LeBoutillier. The program produced a series of videos each participating center could use on their website and in social media. The program was very reasonable and gave a wonderful message and a number of you participated. This new expanded program for 2020 brings together a number of offerings and is called Connect+. I asked Jessica to give us some commentary on the program and she sent us the following details.
While we discussed each tier of options to Connect+, we discussed the real value of just a couple of the elements such as the Facebook or Pandora pieces, it was obvious it would cost a center much more than the total cost of this offer and therefore what a great value this could be for our centers. Obviously you need to consider what Proven Winners® programs you will be carrying, what they can offer that matches up with those products and how you can implement in your center. If the product mix matches what you can sell, the value of this offer is pretty amazing. At a time of increasing effort is needed to handle all the promotional tools a center is utilizing today, this type of support can bring some needed relief. Be sure to also follow the link at the bottom to see the simple chart showing the four levels of promotional support.
An Italian proverb reads, “He that deceives me once, it's his fault, but if twice, it’s my fault.” The question from this is, are you dangerously close to death by marketing?
Do you have a plan to break through your Invisible Ceiling this Spring?
Ask almost any garden center owner a question about the past and the typical response will be… “I don’t even remember what I had for breakfast!”
There’s a reason why reality tv shows are so popular. People like standing in the background watching what takes place in other peoples’ lives. Well, here’s your chance. What follows is an email conversation between a garden center owner and Robert discussing what needs to be considered before making a marketing decision for next spring. Names have been changed but the process Robert knows will work remains.
The following footnotes have been collected by Danny Summers from The Group during discussions on this subject at the time of developing this story. We plan to add additional ideas from others over time. These notes provide important additional Group guidance in developing or evaluating your program(s).
Something really backwards happened when the industry created so called “loyalty” programs. Instead of garden centers creating programs that would actually show gratitude for their loyal customers’ support, most created kick-back programs with rebates in an attempt to “reward” people already shopping with them. The behind closed doors intent was to create a process that would surely make shoppers loyal to the company by offering them financial “bribes”.
[Footnotes have been collected by Danny Summers from The Group during discussions on this subject at the time of developing this story and are located at the end of this article. These notes provide important additional Group guidance in developing or evaluating your program(s).]
Robert Hendrickson has pushed The Group for years now on some of the very best ways to tell your story and build that unique, emotional connection with the customer. This is the extreme opposite of selling by price and certainly much more effective than selling by the old standard of "feature and benefit" marketing.
Laura and her husband, Aaron, started Garden Answer, a YouTube how-to gardening channel filled with style, expertise and helpful gardening knowledge, in 2014. Today, they attract over 300,000 YouTube channel subscribers and have generated over 25 million views of their YouTube gardening videos. Garden Answer has 2.2 million followers and over 450 million video views. Garden Answer has become quite a sensation in just a short time, and the numbers are continually growing!
Their tremendous popularity has prompted industry brands like Proven Winners, Espoma, Gardener's Supply, and others, to partner with Garden Answer to reach consumers.
This past week GreenProfit published an article as titled above. They posed the question: "How can you attract non-gardeners as new customers" to the three finalists in the 2018 Green Profit/Dümmen Orange Young Retailer Award competition, sponsored by Dümmen Orange and AmericanHort!
In the first part of this article we discussed why the word “value” is easily misunderstood, and how this misunderstanding confuses our people. CLICK HERE to read it.
Now that we've cleared up the definition of value, let's use the word in its highest value. The best way to do this will be to get clear on the levels of value.
We need to clear up some confusion over the word “value”.
We Americans are a confused lot. Our language does this to us. Some other languages have one meaning per word. We have many.
Dual meanings are confusing. I have learned that it is a sign of intelligence when toddler’s pickup dual meanings of words. Understanding of multiple definitions of a word is also a sign of intelligence among adults. So let’s understand the simple word “value”, in all its wonder, and amazing complexity, beginning with the textbook definition.
I have no idea where the dictionary is, so we’ll Google. Maybe the definition of value has changed with the Internet? Right from the beginning, the cause of confusion is evident. Value is both a Noun, with two definitions, and a Verb with two additional definitions.
by Robert HendricksonOne of the coolest outcomes of my career is meeting some of the smartest people on the planet. While the list continues to grow as a result of knowing someone who knows someone who introduces me to the next big brain person I meet, David Wolfe remains the one person that impresses me most with his knowledge and insight, especially when it comes to marketing. David sent me what I consider to be one of the top three business books ever written, Ageless Marketing (it so happens David’s other book Firms of Endearment is also one of my top three.) After reading his two books my approach to marketing has remained forever unwavering.
Over the last several years David and I worked together several times, at The Group’s 2007 Fall Event then at other workshop sessions where I invited him to speak. David died of cancer this past February. His perspective and straight forward approach to marketing and consumer insight will be sorely missed.
Last time I shared a marketing conversation that took place between a garden center owner, their ad agency and myself. The agency had been following their typical playbook approach with little impact on the garden center's sales or customer count.
Here's an insider's tip on why agencies are so predictable. The plan they suggest clients follow isn't because the process works and actually has a chance to increase sales, it's because the process they live by is easy for the agency to manage. Getting every client to sign-on to the same media plan makes life easy for the agency and their staff. Easy to sell, easy to create, easy to scale, easy to bill. Easy for the agency. A waste of time and money for the retailer.
I knew exactly what to expect. In fact I could have scripted the entire meeting word for word before we started. I've been asked numerous times by garden center owners to play good cop/bad cop with them and their ad agency. No surprise which cop I play. Even after garden center owners finally realize they've been wasting money, losing momentum and being misled by their ad agency representatives, they still want someone else to do the dirty work. Telling an agency they're no longer needed isn't that difficult. I've done it dozens of times. You send a letter to the CEO and simply say their services are no longer required. But for some reason these same garden center owners feel obligated to schedule a face to face meeting with the agency to share the bad news.
Big mistake.