What You Should Know About

John Friel

1. Those Exasperating Millennials
We’re getting old. We and the industry we love are shriveling like wetted witches. We’re desperate for new blood. We must embrace social media and become relevant. To infect young’uns with our passion for greenery, we’ve got to make gardening easier, more accessible, smaller, cuter! Quick—hire a young person to teach us how to compete with these damned adorable cat videos!

Stop. Breathe.

It says here, we need to quit obsessing over Gen Y, a.k.a. the Millennials. Definition: Born post-1980, hitting young adulthood around the turn of the century. Age range: 14 to 33, i.e., the eldest of this hypothetical cluster could be the parents of the youngest. Digression: “Gen Y and the Millennials” would be a good name for a band.

Gen Yers are doing everything—marrying, home-buying, child-bearing, moving out of your basement—later than their parents and grandparents. Is it really shocking that house plants and gardening aren’t yet front-of-mind? Gardening is a natural adjunct to setting up housekeeping. Young Millennials are simply not ready for us. The older bracket? They’re coming around.

There’s a limit to how easy gardening can be made. Dumbing it down is lying. Somebody has to plan, plant, water, mulch, harvest, weed and make philosophical decisions about insects and diseases. Hand-wringing and pandering won’t turn a distracted, device-addicted twenty-something into a willing gardener. Plant real plants, in the dirt? With my hands? Isn’t there an app for that?

Be patient. They’ll catch up.

2. Sex It Up? Um, Let’s Not.
Most garden product ads are on the wholesome, G-rated side. Periodically, someone tries to spice things up. The implied messages in ads that use sex to sell products to men go like this: Drive this car and a beautiful woman will appear in the passenger seat. Wear this watch on one wrist and a beautiful woman will drape herself over the other. Drink this beer and be the most interesting man in the world. And so on.

European marketers apply similar tactics to selling flowers. In talks, I sometimes use an image from a German trade show of an apparently-nude woman in a bathtub, her attributes concealed by strategically-placed blossoms. Obviously, a guy thing. But a Netherlands-based marketing campaign, Favourite Flower, seeks to turn the tables.

Women buy most plants and flowers, right? So Favourite Flower online ads pose buff, shirtless young men, wheeling wheelbarrows, wielding trowels, flexing and smiling. Does it work? The jury’s still out. It’s only had a couple of years in Europe and hasn’t surfaced here.

The women I’ve shown it to were amused, but said it wouldn’t sway them towards buying flowers. Maybe women are smarter. Or maybe our products are voluptuous all by themselves. Why clutter them up with taut humans of either gender? Look at Georgia O’Keefe’s Red Canna or Light Iris. You won’t top that. As a critic said, “O’Keefe never left any doubt about what part of a plant a flower is.”

I hope this doesn’t read like a peevish screed. I’m actually wildly optimistic about our future. I believe in good targeted marketing; heck, I have to. It’s what I do. And I know that young people have boundless energy and irrepressible imaginations. When something ignites their passions, they’ll pour the gasoline on that fire. We just need to keep providing the spark until they’re ready.

Gardening is never going to be fashionable. But it will never be out of fashion. GP

John Friel is marketing manager for Emerald Coast Growers and a freelance writer.