Know Your Role

Judy Sharpton

In August of 1994 when I hung out the Growing Places Marketing shingle for the first time at the SNA Show in Atlanta, two monsters lurked on the edges of an otherwise thriving independent garden center segment: mass merchandisers (particularly Home Depot) and Internet plant sales.

One has materialized beyond our expectations and the other hasn’t.

I approach each of these issues (then and now) from a store-centered practicality. If any product lends itself to the most important characteristic of a bricks and mortar (or greenhouse and mortar) shopping experience, it’s live plants. A store’s foremost responsibility is to foster customer-merchandise contact. Nothing entices contact more than a blooming, preferably fragrant, live plant. The variety and quality of new plants introduced into the independent channel over the past 10 years has been a visual magnet to bring customers into stores to touch, smell and now, eat and drink.

The practical approach to countering the box stores has been, from the beginning, pay attention, but do what you do best. Sadly, some independents have yet to figure out any clear brand positioning for their stores. They often don’t know what they do best—like creation, delivery and set-up of patio containers three times a year. Often, what the independent does best isn’t even in the box store’s business model. It’s important to pay attention enough to evaluate just what that business model is and how it differs from an independent store’s model.

So, the monsters on the horizon turned out to not be monsters. One never materialized and the other is a highly visible fact.

In the ensuing 20 years, independents have widely viewed their unique selling position as plant knowledge and plant quality. And that’s about as far as the analysis goes.

The mass merchandisers tackled the plant quality problem by transferring the responsibility for product maintenance to the vendor. The better the maintenance and presentation, the better the sales. This concept is a mainstay in all retailing, from the route man who delivers, stocks and fronts Coke at the grocery store to the vendors who supply the non-plant shelves for mass merchandisers. In addition, the mass merchandiser has increasingly relied on point-of-purchase materials and plant tags as silent sellers, simply because they work.
Here’s where the Internet “monster” gets interesting. The Internet isn’t a place to buy plants; it’s a place to learn everything you want to know about plants (and everything else). All the product knowledge on the planet is now just a Google away. That means a customer with a smartphone can know everything she wants to know about a plant from the comfort of her home or right in the store.

So what does that mean when it comes to plant knowledge, including questions about what’s wrong with a plant? Two major impacts: first, the only people coming to a garden center for plant diagnostics today are over 50. Everyone else has already gone online and found the insect or the leaf pattern that tells them just what’s wrong with the plant. I saw this in person during my recent “May I Help You?” project at River Hill Garden Center. I never saw a staff person stumped by a diagnostic question, but every one of the in-store questioners were my age or older.

So, if plant knowledge is a dying unique selling position and boxes are savvying up about plant quality, what’s the independent garden center to hang its hat on?

Remember what Kip Creel Of Standpoint Research told us several years ago: product over process. Evaluate your store for unique products like container gardening, product-based make-and-take events and the latest garden buzz from Pinterest. That’s where you’ll find products that trump process.

Then begin planning how you’re going to jumpstart next year’s staff training program with a unique selling position based on your store’s strengths. Hint: it won’t be plant diagnostics. 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.