Mission-based marketing

Greenscape Gardens has employed a new marketing strategy focused on a mission that’s easy for gardeners to support — restoring the declining monarch population. Instead of just encouraging people to buy plants that attract the pretty pollinators, they’re giving them away for free with any purchase, says Jennifer Schamber, general manager of the Manchester, Missouri, independent garden center.

The effort has a catchy title, too – “Show me the Monarch.” Schamber says she’s using a portion of her marketing budget to purchase four different varieties of milkweed plants, a monarch favorite, and will start with 5,000 this spring.

“We did a soft launch last fall just to see if there was any interest. We only promoted it through our social media outlets, and we were out of our supply, which was 500 plants, in less than five days,” Schamber says. “It was overwhelming the number of people who got on board, and who were excited to be part of a mission.”

The milkweed plants are also part of their “eco-easy” program, a brand they developed last year to designate eco-friendly products in the garden center. They started focusing on green products about eight years ago, but simply labeling the products wasn’t enough.

“We’re looking at marketing our products as solutions to problems,” Schamber says. “We would define eco-easy products as things that have no negative impact on any of the ecosystems in your yard. It’s easy on the Earth.”

And, as the name suggests, it has to be easy, if not easier, than conventional products.

Customers had a lot of misconceptions about what made their products, especially plants, eco-friendly, which sparked the idea to create a label.

“People would say native plants are the only plants we should plant, but there are a lot of plants that aren’t native but that are adaptable to perform extremely well with minimal input and maximum output,” she says.

Other products included in the eco-easy program include fertilizers, pest control products and tools for weeding. Another group of merchandise under the eco-easy label is deer-resistant products. This year, Greenscape Gardens is housing all of the plants deer despise and other control products in one space called “The Deer Free Zone.”

“The development of the eco-easy label has been beneficial for us because if people have the choice between eco-easy and not, as long as the cost isn’t that much more, they are nine times out of 10 going to go in [the eco-friendly] direction,” she says, adding that all products in the program have also been trialed in Greenscape’s gardens to make sure they work. “What I’d like to see it become is a silent salesman. If it’s eco-easy, this is a sure bet, and it’s going to work and be the most ecologically sound solution.”

Hear more about how Greenscape Gardens is promoting deer-resistant products in the “Deer Free Zone” podcast, available on our website or on the Retailer Radio Network station on iTunes.