Flower Power (Hook Marketing)

Growing the Hell Out of a Business by Nailing Retention

Did you know that Home Depot’s Garden Center is a $20 billion a year business?

I didn’t.

Not until I read this article in the Wall Street Journal. Which by the way is such a great paper. I read it every morning and almost always stumble on something that I think about all week.

Here’s a story that stuck with me recently and has led to a really cool way of thinking about hook-based marketing and repeat purchasing in a lot of my conversations internally at Chief Detective and with clients.

The Problem

So the Garden Center at Home Depot is a $20 billion a year business. It's the biggest category, bigger than appliances, by a lot. Pretty incredible. For Home Depot, their version of the holidays isn’t Cyber, it’s Spring, because that's when the Garden Center gets rolling.

But it wasn't always that way. The Garden Center exec team had a problem. It wasn’t a brand awareness problem. Everyone knows Home Depot. It wasn’t a foot traffic problem or an acquisition problem. They've got stores everywhere.

The Garden Center had a retention problem.

Customers would get all geared up with rookie enthusiasm about gardening and go spend a zillion dollars at the Garden Center buying all these flowers and gardening supplies, and spend lots of time and energy planting, putting a lot of personal investment into this effort — and then everything would die a few weeks later and they would give up. The Garden Center’s repeat purchase cycle was broken because customers weren’t getting any return on their effort and investment.

Tackling the Problem

The team at Home Depot realized: We have to make people good at gardening. That's the piece of this repeat cycle that we have to fix, and when we do, things are gonna explode.

So what did they do? They brought the seed generation process essentially in-house and went through a multi-year long effort to work with breeders to develop seeds and genetically modified plants that make gardening easier and give people the payoff they need to stick with it and come back and spend a zillion more dollars the next year.

As part of this process, the team developed simple criteria for what a seed has to do in order to make it into the breeding process and into the stores. The first set of criteria are qualities that help gardeners succeed no matter who or where they are. For example the plants need to be hardy; they need to work in sunlight or shade; they need to last longer.

But then their other criteria has to do with visual and emotional payoff for the customer. Home Depot’s seeds need to have something they call Flower Power and I love the simplicity of this concept.

Flower Power

Flower Power means that the bloom itself has to deliver such a strong visual result that the person investing all this time, energy, and money gets exaggerated gratification from the end result. So the Garden Center team every year challenges their breeders to get creative and innovative. Like, give us novelty. Give us something that's a total surprise and delight for our customers. Give us more color. Give us saturation in the color. Give us a heart in the petal.

What they are after is a visual and emotional customer payoff that is so strong, that the delivery of this customer reward drives year-after-year retention and repeat purchasing. The payoff baked into the product brings the customer back.

And then of course, they’ve also given themself a killer acquisition hook to market around and drive initial purchasing. The visual richness and allure of these blooms as people browse through the Garden Center is a great non-verbal hook to get people to jump in the first place.

Flower Power.

A “hook loop” that flows from:

• The point of acquisition

• Through to the delivery of the acquisition promise in the actual product experience, in an exaggerated, can’t-miss-it way

• Through to the repeat purchase experience that always surprises and delights with product novelty, while still driving their evergreen core bloom sales

And it works because they so clearly understood and isolated the motivating factors for their customers. The key hooks to market and then deliver and then re-market.

Flower Power.

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Applying Flower Power to Your Business

Not everyone is selling flowers, but it’s so clear how can this be applied to what you’re trying to sell and what you are delivering to your customer.

It comes down to crisply understanding the key motivating factors driving people to purchase your product. Methodically finding these motivating factors through testing has been a core organizing principle for us at Chief Detective since the beginning, but I think this “Flower Power” concept is such a clear and simple articulation of the end goal that it will help us stay focused on the forest vs. the trees. So I’ve been talking about it a lot internally to reorient us to the bigger picture of finding big daddy hooks to build end-to-end marketing loops around.

Through our testing, we try to understand:

• Why will somebody buy this thing, whatever it is?

• Why are they really buying it — what is the motivating factor behind a hit headline?

• Why will they keep buying it — what has to get delivered in the acquisition promise, and how do we re-market that to them to reinforce the initial acquisition hook (which will probably never change!) and get them back for a repeat purchase?

We test on a constant, always-on basis.

Because if you understand the motivating factors, you can sell something better, and build loyalty better.

So to me, applying Flower Power means isolating the motivating factor(s) that make people buy something in the first place and then also keep buying it. And once you’ve isolated the motivating factor? Pour water on it. Isolate and pour water on it. Because how do you get a customer for life? You understand their ultimate motivating factor and you deliver it in your marketing, your product, and your re-marketing.

It’s about finding the ultimate hook and milking it.

What do car companies do? For years, decades, they advertise the same thing, with most of that advertising going to their existing base because they're trying to reinforce why you bought it in the first place. To drive loyalty. To get you to buy it again. It’s a good example of an extended hook delivery loop.

That's what Flower Power represents to me — a hook delivery loop, because once you know the motivating factor, you can then exaggerate it and own that message in the marketplace. Use it to acquire, deliver it in the product, and then re-market it. I think a big fallacy of modern marketing is that you need to constantly change your hooks, where 100’s of years of marketing would tell us that the core hooks never change.

The Takeaway

Flower Power is understanding what people want from a product and giving it to them in an exaggerated way, both to drive acquisition and repeat loops, and to try and carve out an ownership position in the market. Own your market segment by being the clearest and loudest competitor in understanding and connecting to the core customer need.

My favorite example of this lately has been an industrial fan company called Big Ass Fans. Pretty clear! I love that they baked the hook so colloquially into the company name, it speaks volumes. Builds confidence, builds instant trust and camaraderie. You both believe that they make powerful fans to dry out a worksite or whatever, and you like them.

This is something you can instantly apply to your business. Do you understand:

• What's the ultimate motivational factor(s) for our customers to repeat purchase or to purchase in the first place?

• How can we deliver that motivating factor in the most tangible, powerful, clear way in our product so that customers are hooked?

• And then do we re-market the same hook to reinforce why they bought in the first place, and get them back? Do we keep delivering against that core “want” through our product novelty?

Developing unique, long-lasting, colorful blooming plants that were easy to grow and made novice gardeners feel gratified and excited was the Flower Power that made the Home Depot Garden Center a $20 billion dollar business. I think that if you take the time to figure out your Flower Power and apply it, you also will find a lot of $$ in a tightly delivered hook delivery loop.

As always, good luck!
Emily