The Industry's One-Stop Source

Client Consultation and Brand Development

Everything we do is customized for the client. Our knowledgeable sales associates begin with one-on-one consultation, to make sure we understand our clients, their operations and their goals. Then we help devise a marketing strategy, offering creative ways to meet the client's objectives.

We don't believe in a cookie-cutter approach. Our experience has taught us that branding is always a cornerstone for success because it increases the value of your plants in a consumer's mind. So we have spent a lot of time cultivating our brand development skills, helping our clients define and promote something unique about their products.

Brand development encompasses a great variety of tactics, any combination of which can be beneficial to a company. Horticultural Marketing & Printing can help you create your unique brand, including:

• Defining your brand
• Naming your brand
• Developing your "brand promise"
• Determining your brand's unique position in the marketplace
• Identifying a price range consumers would be willing to pay
• Selling your brand to retailers
• Effectively communicating your brand to the trade and end consumer

Consumer Research

Consumer research is one of the most powerful tools we offer. There's no better way to determine exactly what consumers want and need from your plants. It's the difference between creating a brand that works or wasting money on something that is completely irrelevant. And, once your brand concept is created, we use consumer research to make sure it will perform up to expectations. This information can be used to refine and optimize your brand before launch.

Many companies-not just greenhouses and nurseries-shy away from consumer research because they think it's too expensive to produce a decent return on investment. Our experience proves otherwise. Not only have we devised ways to make consumer research easy and affordable, we have perfected our research efforts so every piece of data gained provides valuable insight that can be used for brand development.

In order to understand how people shop for plants, we've done considerable investigation into the buying behavior of horticultural consumers. Additionally, we maintain our own consumer data, which we share with our clients. We can also conduct small-scale research projects if a client has specific questions that might not be answered in existing results.

Research Techniques

• Exit interviews-surveys that consumers fill out after they have visited the retail establishment.
• Focus groups-a meeting between 8-12 consumers and a moderator, where specific questions are asked & answered.
• Measurable tests-data gathering that charts objective results, such as how many people purchased your brand over a non-branded option, actual dollar advantage, etc.

Creative Development

Once we've defined a brand, we have to convey its "brand promise," or how it will answer a specific consumer need. Opening that line of communication begins with getting the consumer's attention.

Our talented staff of art directors, graphic designers and production artists will give your plants a distinctive appearance that will catch the consumer's eye at the retail establishment. We specialize in creating original graphics that promote a strong product identity and increase your brand's perceived value. From logo development to custom plant tags, point-of-purchase signage to electronic communications, our team will produce beautiful, original images that accurately portray your brand.

Your verbal message will be carefully honed by our staff of copywriters and editors, all of whom are well versed in the terminology of the horticultural industry. We'll even help you pursue trademark registration for your brand name, slogan and logo. Our team can also help create the sample marketing materials we use to test your new brand in consumer studies.

Visual Services

• Logo development
• Color scheme
• Custom die-shapes
• Point-of-purchase design
• Auxiliary materials
• Trade show graphics

Verbal Services

• Brand slogans/taglines
• Plant/variety names
• Plant descriptions & care
• Auxiliary materials
• Web site content

Support Services

• Trademark search and registration
• Mock-ups for selling to retailers

Photography Services

Unlike most other industries, in horticulture, products are usually sold while they are still young and immature. The finished results occur far away from the retailer-weeks, months or even years after the sale. A good photograph of the plant at full maturity, or depicting the plant's most outstanding feature, can make a world of difference in the consumer's decision-making process. All too often, though, growers and retailers settle for small, flat images that border on ho-hum.

Our approach to photography is different.

We already have more than 70,000 beautiful plant photographs on file, with thousands more added each year by our national network of experienced horticultural photographers. Our specially trained in-house photographer knows how to use camera angles, lighting, setting, filters, props and other special effects to shoot breathtaking images that further differentiate your brand from the competition.

InphoExchange® Online Data Management

Once you have the custom graphics, the compelling product description, the stunning image and other information for each plant variety, it's important to keep everything handy so it can be picked up, revised and re-used in future materials.

Our customers save time and money when we set them up with an electronic database system we call InphoExchange®. InphoExchange is a secure, custom-designed database library that organizes and stores your plant copy, photography and design templates. It's completely expandable, growing to meet your needs as they change over time. Plus, it makes proofreading and approving your projects easy.

You can access your private InphoExchange database through the internet 24/7, so it's a snap to update with new information or photography whenever you like. The next time your tags, catalogs or other marketing tools are produced, the changes will appear. The whole system facilitates a consistent look and feel throughout your branding and marketing efforts. It even makes it easy to expand into signs, catalogs, web sites and other communication materials, quickly and economically.

Printing Services

• Sheet-fed printing for plant tags, labels and signs
• Thermal transfer printing for on-site fast turn tags, labels, signs, etc.
• Screen printing for banners, signs and large format displays
• Web printing for books, manuals and catalogs
• Digital printing for short-run signs, banners, truck graphics, brochures and prototypes
• Flexographic printing for thermal transfer printable tags, labels or chemical labels, and bench wraps

Auxiliary Services

• Elastic string attachments
• Binding-saddle stitch, perfect, Wire-O®
• Ink-jet-for adding bar codes and/or price points to tags
• Fulfillment-collation of point-of-sale kits
• Bulk mailing-ship your catalogs direct
• Drop-shipment-direct to retailers or sales reps
• Inventory-warehouse point-of-sale materials for distribution

Custom Plant Tags

Research shows that the plant tag is the number one source of information used by consumers when making their purchase decisions. Not only that, up to 82% of consumers keep the tags to use as reference.

If the average plant tag has that kind of effect, imagine what an exceptional plant tag would do. Larger, more distinctive tags make a substantial impact on sales. Consumers are more apt to notice them. They can hold more information, increasing the probability of winning the sale. And that extra information encourages the consumer's success after the sale, contributing to his or her overall satisfaction with your brand, which in turn leads to brand loyalty.

Plant tags are also the only form of marketing that give a grower complete control. The grower chooses the size, shape, message, photography and actual location on the plant. And for pennies per tag, it is by far the best marketing investment a grower can make.

• One-of-a-kind graphics
• Impressive photography
• Eye-catching custom die-shapes
• Interesting, easy-to-read type
• Fresh, compelling wording
• Label display stakes position tags prominently above the plant

Online Customized
Signage

When you get right down to it, growers and retailers share two main goals: sell as many plants as possible for the maximum profit. We've devised an easy-to use retail sign service to help both reach those goals, called epopglobal.com sign ordering system. A revolutionary concept, epop® (Electronic Point-Of-Purchase) enables growers to provide retailers custom, full-color signs without incurring the cost of large sign inventories.

Basically, epop is an Internet-driven "self-serve" source for custom signs. We know that climate has an effect on a plant's specific care. With epop, you can give the consumer the information they need to make a better buying decision. And that promotes greater success and satisfaction.

Retailers can log onto the grower's custom epop site and order just what they need simply by selecting size, shape, pricing and logo options, then changing copy like sun exposure, size and care information to customize the signs for their area of the country. It takes just minutes. The orders are sent straight to our printing facilities, where we automatically produce the signs and ship them to the retailer within days.

Growers save time, money and space with epop. It also helps build confidence within the grower-retailer relationship.

Advertising Services

If 65% of plants sold are bought on impulse, that means 35% involved some sort of pre-planning. Consumer advertising enables you to speak to that 35% while they are still in the planning stages, encouraging them to make your brand part of their design and even driving them to make a trip to the retail establishment so they can purchase your plants.

There's also another option available: trade advertising, also known as business-to-business. With trade advertising, you can sell your brand to retail establishments in the interest of increasing your total number of sales outlets.

Even when they are selling the same product, a consumer ad and a trade ad are quite different, because each of the target audiences have different goals. Your consumers, for example, are interested in plant health, beauty, ease of care, etc. Your retailers are concerned about profit margins, fast turns and other dollars-and-cents priorities.

As any experienced advertising professional can tell you, some messages are best delivered in print, others on television or over the radio, and so on. We can help you determine which media opportunities will work best within your budget for your consumer and trade messages. After devising a time line for your advertising campaign, we'll also help you craft effective ads, then follow through by negotiating a good price for media placement.

Consumer Advertising

• Newspaper
• Magazine
• Radio
• Television
• Internet
• Direct mail
• Billboard

Trade Advertising

• Trade journals
• Industry magazines
• Direct mail