6/27/2014
It’s Summer Tour Time
Judy Sharpton
One of the elements of many summer trade programs, both national and local, is a tour of garden centers and perhaps a trendy retailer or an iconic horticultural facility or a public garden in the vicinity of the meeting. On the local level, meetings are often hosted by a member garden center. In either case, you get to look at someone else’s store, presumably for the purpose of evaluating opportunities to bring back to your own store. You may also be asked to provide feedback in the form of constructive criticism.
You know the drill. If you’re participating in a national show tour, you board a bus at crack-of-dawn-thirty with a cup of coffee and receive a collection of descriptions of the various stops. Sometimes a chatty bus monitor tries to engage the group in break-the-ice conversation. You arrive at the planned stop, get off the bus, listen to a (hopefully) short introduction and begin either a guided or self-guided tour. After some prescribed time, you re-board the bus and, depending on the level of response, (positive or negative) to the store just seen, engage in conversation with other people on the bus. Repeat.
If you’re attending a meeting at a member store, this may be the only time you visit a store in your area all year. That’s another topic, but you at least have the opportunity to see what other stores in your general area are doing. In most cases when a garden center hosts a local meeting, they have something to show off—new structures or other physical developments that warrant attention from peers.
So, if you’re going to spend an entire day either on a bus or at a garden center, what should you accomplish with that valuable time? Here are some helpful tips:
• Read the print material the garden center has provided and know what size and kind of store you’re about to see. You wouldn’t go to a movie without some prior knowledge, even if it’s only that you like a particular actor in the movie. Ask yourself how this store is similar and different from your store. Covered shopping? All outdoors? Big tree and shrub inventory? Landscape services? Grower/Retailer? Gift department? Specialty plant categories?
• Fire up your smartphone or get someone around you on the bus to do it if you’re still a flip phone person and see how the store’s website jives with the print material. Does it look like the same store in both the print version and the electronic version?
• When you get off the bus, survey the front of the store from the parking lot to see how many entrances the customer has to sift through in order to enter the store. Can you tell where you’re supposed to enter the store? If you can’t make a choice, ask one of your hosts to tell you where they want the customer to enter the store. You may or may not get an answer.
• As you walk through the store, compare the three-dimensional space to both the print description and the web presentation. Does the store “look like” the place you saw on the web, not just physically, but in terms of level of sophistication and product offerings?
• Buy something. It’s a nice gesture, but it also gets you a look at how the cash register and the cash register staff operate. Are you offered any add-on products or asked to be placed on an email list? Try to buy something at every stop that reflects that store’s personality (be sure to find the sale department if the store has one). You’ll have a visual record of each store that you can review with your staff when you get home.
GP
Judy Sharpton, LEED Green Associate and member of ARCSA, is a garden center design and renovation specialist with 35 years experience in advertising and promotion, and is the owner of Growing Places Marketing.