Scotts to Go Nationwide With Custom Mag in 2004
The success of a spring 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.
