Who Is Your Customer?

Customers are the core of all retail success. After all, what they want in products and experience determines what you sell.

What Is The 10% Project?

The Today’s Garden Center 10% Project is an ambitious, multi-project event focused on raising garden retail plant revenues by 10 percent.

If garden centers can increase their strongest category by 10 percent, then the entire store is healthier. And if enough stores improve plant sales, the entire industry is stronger.
Today’s Garden Center’s 10% Projects for 2012 include:

Who are your customers?

In this issue, a Revolutionary 100 Retailer and a university researcher explore how a better understanding of a garden center’s customers leads to increased sales.

How price sensitive are consumers when it comes to plants?

The results of a Today’s Garden Center-commissioned university study will be unveiled in August.

How can visual merchandising improve plant sales?

Today’s Garden Center and OFA will explore this question with a live event in September and feature articles and video in November.

Despite this, few in the garden center industry have ever researched their own customers. There have been commonly traded viewpoints about customers — garden center shoppers are empty nesters, primarily female and financially secure. Even if that is true for many, it may not be so for you.

So as part of The 10% Project, Today’s Garden Center asked Emory University marketing professor Susan Hogan about how small businesses could go about conducting their own research.

We then asked Revolutionary 100 Northeast Regional Winner Lakeview Nurseries’ Michelle Harvey and Richard Bursch if they would be willing to put Hogan’s methods into practice. They enthusiastically agreed.

Over the next two and a half months, Harvey and Bursch learned a lot about their customers, all of which Harvey recorded in a diary. There were some significant surprises. They discovered problem areas that needed immediate attention. And they were able to find solutions while spring was still under way.

The Three Research Models

Hogan suggested three methods that, when taken together, should give retailers a basis upon which to make many decisions, from marketing to buying to store layout.

The Observational Method. The research that had the most immediate impact on Lakeview Nurseries is similar to what Jane Goodall did when she studied chimpanzees in the wild. Lakeview arranged for individual customers to be unobtrusively followed throughout the store, with the observer noting details about the customer’s age and behavior.
The Interview Method. The second method doesn’t look like any traditional research you are used to seeing. The retailer sits down with or calls a single customer at a time and tries to get to the root of what gardening means to that individual. Hogan calls this type of study laddering. It starts with a low-key question along the lines of “What was the last gardening purchase you made?” The follow-up questions are then designed to reach the emotional heart of why the purchase was made and help translate that into future sales.
The Survey Method. The final method is the most far reaching. Hogan created a sample survey for all of Lakeview Nurseries’ customers on the store’s eMail list.

Watch for Part 2, which reveals the surprising results from the observational research.

Today’s Garden Center and Emory University professor Susan Hogan team up to help Lakeview Nurseries better understand their customers and, ultimately, increase their sales.