Branding, creative marketing and premium pricing place N.H. greenhouse business at the top of its class

How can a farming operation sell commodity items at premium prices and still outsell the competition?

The short answer is this: The business owners created a strong brand that is known and trusted by every link in their marketing chain.

The brand is called Proven Winners®. The business is Pleasant View Gardens, which operates facilities in Loudon and Pembroke, N.H. The owners are brothers Henry and Jeff Huntington, two of the Northeast’s top growers of annual and perennial plants for eastern U.S. wholesalers. The brothers are also major players in the U.S. horticulture industry, and this is their story …

Second-generation farmers

The Huntingtons are second-generation farmers who have been honing their vision since they were boys growing up on the family farm in Westport, Conn. While Henry and Jeff would probably never call themselves visionaries, that label fits them to a “T.”

The term fits because the two brothers are in fact visionaries who have paid close attention to agribusiness’s changing playing field and taken advantage of new opportunities.

The core of their business is starter and finished bedding plants, which they plant and cultivate under nine acres of greenhouses at their two New Hampshire sites. But the core business has evolved into much more — today the Huntingtons are probably best known for the marketing of Proven Winners — a revolutionary “plant material” that is marketed to wholesale growers.

The Huntingtons are one of three principal greenhouse business partners that created and market the Proven Winners brand. (The other partners are located in California and Michigan.)

Proven Winners plants are innovative, well-bred and hybrid-color varieties that perform well for both the commercial and home gardener. Plants selected to bear the Proven Winners name have been trialed and tested and found to be more colorful, faster growing, versatile and more vigorous than any other plants on the market.

How the brand grew

Henry Huntington commented on the inception of the branding program. “We saw the opportunity,” he said, “but we were very naïve in the beginning, and didn’t have a clue about branding.When we first started Proven Winners, with our partners in California and Michigan, the idea of a brand didn’t even cross our minds.We simply wanted to introduce new product and differentiate ourselves in the marketplace.”

After a few years, the Huntingtons realized that they had a unique product with a special name that offered genuine value in a price-driven market sector. “We didn’t know all the branding facts, but we were smart enough to understand that consumers often shop brands and that we could provide a quality product that satisfied their needs.”

How to turn a commodity into a recognized brand

The unique propagation process, by itself, is a difficult sell, so the brand team’s challenge was to add value by creating ways to differentiate their product and create buyer demand. They started with three key focal points:

• New, unique plants. Growers, retail centers and consumers are always attracted to anything that’s “new,” so the Huntingtons and their business partners developed relationships with breeders who developed new varieties, new crosses and new species.

• Proven. The Proven Winners team trials thousands of plants every year, but only 10 to 20 earn the Proven Winner label. Said Henry, “This helps ensure that growers will be able to grow our liners [young plants] fairly easily and be successful. Retailers will note the market power of these plants and consumers will be able to grow lush, successful gardens.”

• Purity of product. Proven Winners plants start with the “cleanest” plant material available, and Henry points out that a German lab regenerates new plants via tissue culture. The procedure includes a thermal therapy process that eliminates harmful viruses and encourages plant growth. The Proven Winners brand team makes every effort to keep the plants free of latent viruses or diseases. “We test to ensure that this is so,” says Henry, “and we get new clean material for each variety, every year.”

Henry commented further about how the added value of the Proven Winners works its way through the market chain. “Wholesale growers who purchase our plants grow better quality plants faster,” he said, “and thereby create more value in the product that they sell to retail garden centers.”

The strategy of building value in the chain actually helped give birth to the brand. “We didn’t realize that branding was part of it,” Henry said, “until we saw how we could add value to the product.” The added value, he suggested, allows marketers further down the chain — the wholesaler and the retailer — to move the product at a premium price.

“At a time when prices were being squeezed by the big box retailers and there was no differentiation in the marketplace,” Henry said, “we brought in new, unusually well-bred plants. We created demand in the chain for a better product, and we created opportunities for each link to make money.”

Click here to continue reading this story!

This article first appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of Financial Partner magazine. You can receive this FREE publication by clicking here.

Contact us at info@firstpioneer.com for more information.

© 1999-2005 First Pioneer Farm Credit, ACA. All rights reserved.