Are you a Pepsi or a Coke person? Do you buy your cell phone plan from Catherine Zeta-Jones or the “Can you hear me now…good” guy? There are many choices out there for the consumer, but once you capture the imagination of an American buyer, you’re almost guaranteed a customer for life.
The Endless Summer hydrangea brand by Bailey Nurseries has used marketing, packaging and consistent product characteristics to capture the head and heart of the buying public and has made itself a winner with independent garden centers, in turn.
“We devoted a lot of our marketing effort directly at the consumer,” says Jonathan Pedersen, director of sales and marketing at Bailey. “Instead of trying to push it through the channel, we pulled it through and I think that’s why we’ve had success. You can talk to any independent garden center and they’ll say, ‘Endless Summer was by far the best selling plant we’ve ever had. Customers were calling to ask for it.’”
Back In The Beginning
Bailey discovered the Endless Summer hydrangea over 20 years ago and Dr. Michael Dirr championed the plant, which blooms on current season’s growth. The product quality was there, both in the frozen tundra of Minnesota and in the South, where late-spring frosts can kill other hydrangeas’ blooms. But how to get the consumer familiar and excited about the product? Marketing.
Spreading the word is not cheap. To reach the consumer, Bailey spent over $1 million in consumer advertising, but a huge public relations push generated publicity equivalent to $35 million in advertising. Unique and creative PR moves included sending press releases designed as wedding invitations for Endless Summer Blushing Bride and carrying boxes for plants delivered to garden writer shows so editors and writers could take the plants home with them, even when traveling by plane. These moves have landed Endless Summer in Martha Stewart Living magazine and Bailey looks forward to exposure in bridal magazines next spring.
It’s All In The Packaging
Go to any garden center and you’ll see many different types of hydrangea. Without proper packaging, the consumer won’t know why one product is different or better than another. Endless Summer went with a blue pot with a happy flower logo. The blue pot stands out among a sea of black nursery pots, a similar strategy employed by Anthony Tesselaar’s Flower Carpet Rose pink pot. The name, imagery and types of signage Endless Summer uses create its brand personality, to which people gravitate.
“If it was just in a black pot, it would have looked like all the other hydrangea,” says Pedersen. “We had to make it look special, and the blue pot is part of that. To me, doing that kind of stuff was key as was the point-of purchase-material.”
The modern, clean look and pleasing color scheme of the product’s point-of-purchase materials is carried through in signs, benchtags, banners, posters and corex fixtures. The look is consistent across all marketing materials, although there are three different templates for retailers to choose from. Each has its own personality, but all fall under the brand umbrella and guidelines. The consumer’s attraction to marketing, which has worked for iPod and Starbucks, is what Geoff Grassle of Initio Advertising, the firm that helped Bailey to develop its marketing, calls the head-heart connection.
“You have to connect to the consumers when it comes to a brand on both levels,” Grassle says. “If you connect emotionally, you’ll get them once. If you connect rationally, you’ll get them once. It’s those brands that somehow are able to speak to both, the mind as well as the heart, that’s where you really create brand loyalty and a strong brand following.” Pedersen agrees.
“If Coca-Cola tasted bad, they probably wouldn’t sell it,” Pedersen says. “You’ve got to have a good product to start with, but what good marketing can do is to take a good product and make it better. I think Apple’s iPod is a great example of that. It’s just like other MP3 players, but everyone’s got to have an iPod. It’s done a great job of marketing a good product.”
Where To Sell It?
The strategy from the product’s beginning was that Endless Summer would be an exclusive product for garden centers for a period of time. After that, it would be open to the mass market, coinciding with the release of another new product exclusive to independents. That new product – Blushing Bride – is now going through its soft introduction.
“Independents are looking for what’s new and different,” Grassle says. “They don’t want the commodity plants that go toe to toe against the big box stores.”
Grassle insists that branding is where the green industry is going and warns that without a product specific or umbrella brand in place, products’ and companies’ reputations will be relegated to that of a commodity.
“At that point, it becomes a price war – who can grow, ship and sell cheaper,” he says. “I don’t know anyone in their right mind that wants to be in that boat and fight that battle.”