Bring home the bacon, one sign at a time

Garden Center readers, meet Pig. Pig is the star marketer at Tim’s Garden Centre in Campbelltown, New South Wales, Australia, about an hour outside of Sydney. He has become quite the sensation around town as part of a storefront display. We spoke with owner Tim Pickles about how he uses clever signage and a friendly pig to keep customers coming back.
 

Garden Center: How did Pig come to be a part of the business?

Tim Pickles: Pig started work at Tim’s Garden Centre about three years ago. We used to have funny signs on our fence when we first started business to draw people’s attention. We are on the corner of a busy intersection, and when the lights turn red it was an opportunity for us to make people laugh. Our nursery became famous for these signs. Then we became so busy we didn’t have time for funny signs. As time goes by you forget about the things that made you famous.

Anyway, one of those industry marketing gurus Bill Bret from New Zealand called into our nursery to see what we were doing. He reminded me that we used to have funny signs that made him laugh. We went to his presentation that night and he showed photos of nurseries from around the world. The best ideas are stolen! Then he reminded me again that we were boring now!

On the way home from the talk I had this idea that perhaps we could put one of our ceramic pigs on a milk crate out in the front of our nursery. He could comment on issues of the day with our changeable sign. We had just started selling these pink pigs. My manager thought that we would run out of ideas in the first couple of weeks. But that was three years ago and Pig has become an icon in Campbelltown.
 

GC: How often does Pig get a (sign) makeover?

TP: The sign gets changed twice weekly and the photo is posted on Facebook. Pig gets twice as many hits as any plant story we ever post. Pig also appears in our weekly enewsletter. See our website (timsgardencentre.com.au) for details.
 

GC: What’s been the ROI on putting Pig out front?

TP: We sell the pigs in our nursery for $37.99 AUD ($28.95 USD). We have sold over 3,000. Pig is big business.
 

GC: What have been a few of Pig’s more memorable moments?

TP: He nearly got run over last year and the Facebook photo of the car crash got over 20,000 hits. More than 200 people made a comment and Pig ended up on the front page of our local paper. There was also a two-page spread showing the comments from Facebook. We had a birthday party for Pig that got huge media results, too. He has been stolen several times but because Pig is so famous it is only Pig’s [stunt] double that ever goes missing.

A lady once asked me if I could pick her out a Pig to take home. We have around 20 on display at any time. I looked at the Pigs for a couple of minutes then chose one for her. “What made you choose that one?” she asked. “It had nice eyes” I replied. “Yes,” she commented. “I noticed that.”