Scotts Goes Nationwide with Custom Mag

The success of a spring 2003 loyalty effort by The Scotts Co. bodes well for a national rollout of Grow, a magazine for consumer gardeners. An initial mailing of 500,000 copies yielded double-digit sales increases in the test areas. The trial was aimed at existing Scotts customers in 15 markets primarily in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic and Midwest, said Carol Edwards Holmes, the Marysville, OH lawn care firm’s manager of interactive marketing and partnerships. Plans for 2004 include evaluating the size, frequency, distribution and possible geographic versioning of the publication.

Grow’s roots are in a customer segmentation study Scotts did in early 2002, in which it gained a deeper understanding of the demographics, attitudes and purchasing behavior of customers with high and low involvement in lawn care and gardening. The magazine was conceived as a vehicle to reach the company’s highly involved customers.

For Scotts, the next task was determining which 500,000 individuals within its 2 million-customer file should receive the inaugural issue. Geography played a part, as did commercial activity and previous interaction with the company.

Wunderman New York, which coordinated the database activity, pulled together three groups of customers. The file included people who had visited Scotts’ Web site and elected to receive additional communication, those who had phoned the company’s call center and those who redeemed a rebate coupon during the past two years.

The magazine marked a departure in Scotts’ advertising strategy. “It was an interesting approach by a nontraditional direct marketer to reach out to its best customers and prospects,” said Michael Sugzda, senior vice president and group account director at Wunderman.

After Scotts provided the agency with primary research, Wunderman appended some 500 variables from AmeriLink, a consumer database run by Wunderman subsidiary KnowledgeBase Marketing. This data helped Wunderman generate a profile of Scotts’ best customers. Appended data points included standards such as age, income and home value.

Wunderman had considered evaluating whether a target worked close to a Scotts vendor, but discarded this strategy.

“This isn’t like selling toothpaste, where I can go to CVS [and buy it during a break],” Sugzda said. “You’ve got 40-pound bags of Miracle-Gro to contend with.”

The magazine itself ran 44 full-color, saddle-stitched pages, and measured 8-1/8 inches by 10-7/8 inches. Editorial content, designed by Redwood Customer Communications, Toronto, is infused with brand messages to varying degrees. On some pages the branding is overt, with actual packages as part of the layout. On others, brands are woven into the text, while some pages don’t contain any product information at all.

“It made readers aware that if they joined this club, they would receive certain benefits, including an ongoing subscription to the magazine,” said Manuela Yarhi, Redwood’s group account director.

Part of the magazine’s function was to promote the value of Scotts merchandise. Most of the firm’s sales are made through Wal-Mart, Home Depot and Lowe’s, all of which have lawn-care house brands that usually are cheaper than Scotts.

The magazine directs Scotts customers to the company’s Web site (www.scotts.com), urging them to sign up for a gardening tips e-newsletter. Both the magazine and the e-mail tips are part of the Grow It club, an umbrella loyalty program for Scotts customers. The magazine features unique URLs and toll-free numbers, allowing Scotts to track the inquiries and Grow It club registrations the magazine generates.

Since Grow’s launch, Scotts has seen a high-five-figure growth in the number of individuals signing up for Grow It, Edwards Holmes said. Additionally, the weekly e-mail program’s open rate has been “very, very strong.”

The test campaign began right around the time that customers may have had their thoughts turned from buying garden supplies. As Scotts itself noted when discussing its spring sales results, cool, wet weather dampened April sales.

Despite the adverse weather, Scotts saw a double-digit sales lift in the test markets over the control non-recipients, and follow-up research revealed a 38% increase in intend-to-purchase levels in the best markets, according to Edwards Holmes. Great Scotts!

Campaign: Grow Magazine

Marketer: The Scotts Co.

Database manager: Wunderman New York

Production company: Redwood Customer Communications, Toronto

Initial campaign volume: 500,000 copies in a spring 2003 test