Two years ago, Zelenka initiated its innovative Natural Life program to serve independent garden centers with brand-name plant selections, supported by POP displays and direct-mail pieces to consumers. Has it been successful? Zelenka marketing director George Atkinson reflects on the first full year of the program.

Q. How about an update on Natural Life.
A. It's going very well. We have 51 dealers in the program this year. We are meeting or exceeding our expectations on where we thought we would be in sales. We are not taking any new dealers for fall 1998; we are taking new dealers for 1999.

Q. Why quit when you're ahead?
A. Because this was our first rollout year, we wanted to make sure we were doing a good job for everybody, and we wanted to take out the variable of having people join in the middle and having to catch them up.

Q. What number did you have in mind when you started?
A. Actually, we were looking for 50. For a while it looked like we weren't going to get there, because there was a great learning curve for our customers and especially our salespeople. Natural Life is more program-oriented. It's a whole new way for them to sell -- to understand it and explain it to customers.

Q. Is Natural Life customized for each garden center?
A. Really, it's all the same program. We do have a pre-pricing sticker that we use on all plants, with the name of the garden center on it. The direct-mail piece is also customized for each retailer. It includes their store address and phone. By in large, the program is basically the same from retailer to retailer.

Q. What is the area covered by your retail customers in the program?
A. Basically, the farthest dealer to the east is in Philadelphia, the southernmost dealer is in Knoxville, Tenn., the farthest west would be in Nebraska.

Q. Is this for the most part your customer area?
A. Yes, this covers most of our main service area. But as we have been running some ads in some of the trade magazines, including yours, we've been getting requests from all around the country.

Q. As you continue to sell to the mass merchandisers, how does Natural Life fit in?
A. We'll always sell to the mass merchandisers, but we've got these independents, some of which are struggling, who have different needs now than they used to, whether they recognize this or not. We tried to build a program that would help them secure their place in the market as they're going to war with these mass merchandisers. That's really what Natural Life is about, a program designed for the independent garden centers only to help them fill the niche that the consumer is looking for them to fill.

Q. How do you determine what plants to offer your Natural Life customers?
A. By next year, we are going to have all our varieties available to them. Plus, we give them a two-year exclusive on all new varieties, so they'll have a wider range of product to choose from than someone who's not in the program. We have over 800 varieties, so it's taken us some time to get all the varieties converted over to the program. It's up to them to choose the plants for their areas.

Q. It sounds like Natural Life plants would take up much of a garden center's display space.
A. We're not trying to take over a whole garden center. I guess there are one or two smaller people in the program where it's pretty much their whole garden center, but what we're trying to offer them is a store-within-a-store concept. And, they choose the varieties that are good for them; that's why we have to have such a wide offering available to them.

Q. How large will Natural Life get?
A. We envision over the next several years a quite dramatic growth in the program in the number of dealers that will become involved. After three to five years it will probably level off to some degree because the program isn't for everybody. We know that there's a limit to it, because there are certain things they have to do, and certain things we agree to do, and it's basically what we've determined is the formula for success. So, we're trying to get them to buy into doing the things that we know will make them successful. Some of them feel that, 'Hey, why are you telling me what I should do' and 'I don't want to do that.' Well, that's fine. Maybe the program is not for you.

Q. Where did you get this idea?
A. We recognized, about four years ago, how the mass merchandisers were growing, and we didn't necessarily like what we saw. They were predicting that something like 60 percent of the independent garden centers going out of business. So we said this really isn't good and we need to do something to help these people. This was about the time that the [proposed Plants for America] promotion order was struggling, which would have been good for our industry in terms of promoting the positive aspects of plants, so we decided to do some research to see where we could go.

We hired a market researcher, and what he looked at was why people subconsciously buy products. He determined that all Americans have the same basic notions about products. We analyzed all the research to see what we learned, and then we came up with this program. Then we test-marketed it for two years in several different locations. We re-analyzed the results from retail. And we also had collected names of consumers who had participated in the direct-mail program with the coupon offer, and we surveyed those people, and we asked them a lot of questions about the program.

What we were trying to discover there was if things we were trying to get across to the consumer, did the consumer get them? If we were trying to talk about the benefits of plants in their lives, did that come across? From there we made some fine-tuning, and then we went on to another test market the next year, which was last year, then that led to the rollout this year. So, it's been quite some time in coming along. It's been kind of fun.

Q. Can any grower do this sort of marketing?
A. I think they can. They may not do it on the scale we did, but I think anybody can do it. You have to be prepared to be in it for quite some time to make it pay off for you. We've been at it for four years now, since the concept of the idea and the research started. And, it's going to be a couple of more years before the program really gets to the point where we think it should get.

I look at the Flower Carpet rose. We've been involved with that, too. This was our third spring with it. Not that the first couple of years weren't good, but all of a sudden things really took off for Flower Carpet. Our sales were up over 40 percent from last year. It just takes a while to get these programs out there, and the consumers start to see them two, three, four times, and they say, maybe there is something to that and they start to look for it.

We've approached this [Natural Life] totally differently from the way a lot of other growers do. A lot of other growers say, how can I sell my customers more plants? How can I get that retail garden center to buy more from me? We went at it totally from the other end, and we said, how can our retailers sell consumers more plants? If we can help them sell consumers more plants, then ultimately we're going to be more successful with them. So we went at it more from the pull-through aspect than from the push-through aspect.

© 1998 Branch-Smith Publishing