29 DecAre You Listening to What Your Customers Really Want?

I came across this article by Mark Cuban last week. It does a great job of reinforcing that if you want to be an industry leader and improve your sales and profits, you need to provide innovative solutions instead of just incremental improvements. This where I think many Ornamental Horticulture suppliers miss an important point. We forget our ultimate customer is the consumer who makes decisions to buy plants on how they fill their perceived emotional needs, as ornamental plants are not a necessity in people’s lives.

01 DecInsights into Successful Product / Concept Development

Many times product concepts are developed because an item is easy to produce or because companies have a lot of a particular item in the inventory pipeline that they need to find a new way to market and sell. While the product concept might meet the producers need to move inventory, it may have missed the mark in addressing a true consumer need leading to a failed product launch. The article below points out many of the pitfalls you can run into when developing a new product or brand concept.

One of the pitfalls the author points out is not making an emotional connection with the consumer. This is an important point for the green industry, as plants have a very strong emotional connection to consumers. Research done on this topic provided great insights that this strong emotional connection between people and plants can overcome the logical benefits and features of a product. If a brand or product can create that emotional hook to the consumer, it can provide an exponential value to them resulting in more sales than products that fail to make that connection.