When online plant retailer, Patch, launched its new Plant Paramedic Service, BF media were called upon by our friends at Pitch Marketing Group to create as much noise on the airwaves as possible about the new door-to-door revival service for houseplants that were neglected while their owners were away on holiday.
While we knew that the topic would resonate with broadcast producers and presenters up and down the country – we needed to create additional talking points that would validify the commercial nature of the service launch. These points or ‘truths’ as we like to call them, needed to focus on issues that were relevant to potential new customers.
These were:
- Dying plants can be saved
- Many can’t tell if a plant is dying/can be saved
- Many don’t know how to save a plant
- Too many people throw house plants away as a result
- This costs money
Working collegiately with the Pitch Marketing Group team, we surveyed 10,000 plant enthusiasts to identify a number of truths regarding plant ownership that we knew would provide our pitch with an array of ‘broadcast ready’ conversations starters on such themes.
The data ended up showing that 38% of respondents admitted to throwing away a plant after returning from vacation because it appeared to be dying. . 51% of respondents said they spent more than £10 per year on replacements, and 13% admitted to spending over £50 and 40% threw plants away because it looked like it was dying.
A final, yet strategically important, consideration was the timing of the launch. Knowing that a wealth of gardening related programming airs over weekends we recommended that our spokespeople were available for interviews from Thursday through to Saturday ahead of the launch the following Monday. In doing this we gave ourselves the best chance of setting up live and pre-recorded as live interviews with our key target audience at the perfect moment in time.
Kicking off with CNS, the BBC’s Central News Service, on the Friday and finishing with Sky News interviews Patch’s founder Freddie Blackett the following Monday we delivered 3 days worth of non stop interviews that delivered all our commercial messages to millions of people that indexed highly against Patch’s key target audience.
Moreover, the Plant Paramedic service was fully booked by the time our last interview wrapped.
