What Makes you Buy a Plant?
Last fall, I noticed something about the plants that I was purchasing:
All the plant labels were different.
Each label had very different information listed.
I usually kept the label so I knew what I planted where.
I’m not alone in keeping those labels. A gardening group did a survey of customers and found that 75% of people keep their plant labels and of that 75%, 98% refer to them. That’s a small object that has a ton of influence!
So it got me thinking. What if I could make all the labels the same and put information, like the insects and birds that plant supports, on the pot? Could that change shopping habits of plant buyers? I brought this idea to one of the owners of Primex Garden Center in Glenside and he very kindly told me that “changing the plant labels was way above” his pay grade. But, he knew what I was trying to do and wanted to help. So we agreed to bring something to life and implement it in the store in the new year. I got to work on the idea.
Brainstorming with my family, friends and neighbors, we came up with 4 icons, Pollinator Pit Stop, Stormwater Sponge, Caterpillar Café, and Bird Buffet, a simple way to help shoppers understand what a plant actually does, not just what it will look like in your garden. Although what it will look like, where it needs to go, how big it gets and when it blooms is also important, so we included that too.
The end result, after a lot of back and forth with my amazing graphic designer looked like the image with this blog post. It looked so good!!! But that wasn’t all. We agreed that a native plant shopping guide would be helpful for customers who are not quite sure where to start with picking plants. Sometimes the hardest part of planting season isn’t enthusiasm. It’s figuring out which plants make sense for your yard, your goals, and the birds, bees, and butterflies you’re hoping to support.
We’ve been trialing it in the garden center for over a month and the results we’ve seen already are incredible. The QR-coded plant stickers and printed guides have helped drive 324 website visits, 199 unique visitors and 534 pageviews to the Mediocre Gardener website. Because that traffic is coming from the QR codes on plants and guides, the website is acting like a dashboard for in-store interest, showing that local shoppers are noticing, scanning, clicking, and signing up. The language is also sticking: one customer was overheard using the phrase “Caterpillar Café” in the store. It is still too early to measure whether the system is selling more natives or not, but we’re proving that better native plant merchandising is creating measurable shopper engagement.
It’s a start, but it’s a strong start and we’re excited to see where this goes!
