IT’S that time of year again. Our showcase. Two weeks of prime-time TV coverage of immaculately manicured grass. Longer coverage – and far more relevant to us than say Chelsea Flower Show.
On what turned out to be some of the hottest days ever recorded at Wimbledon, the striped ‘stage’ this week looks fantastic and a real credit to Neil Stubley and his team at AELTC. Just a pity that the ‘actors’ have to run around and scuff it all up.
But it did strike me that the grass machinery industry does not make enough of this annual opportunity to ‘big-up’ our purpose in life. Copyright issues can limit use of Wimbledon images, but there is nothing to stop a local dealer using promotional tactics to remind customers that fine turf just doesn’t happen.
Strangely, the one place where I once saw a garden machinery showroom window plastered with pictures of the Centre Court and the slogan, “YOU can have a garden like this”, was in France back in the early ‘90s. I had gone over on a visit arranged by Roy Ashwell of Mountfield to report on one of their dealers, Gai Jardin at Louvril, as part of a feature we were running on the Single Market ahead of its introduction in 1992.
The family owned dealership was interesting on two counts. First it was located on a small retail park where the lead retailer was the giant French mega-store Auchan, reckoned to be the second largest retailer in the world.
In those days, customers would browse the mowers in Auchan (“an Aladdin’s cave of leading brands sat forlornly and unattended with little flair for display”) - and then pop into the specialist where they could get advice and service and buy at comparable prices.
The second fascinating aspect of Gai Jardin’s business was the amount of rear roller rotary mowers they sold. Although mowers were secondary to their main business of animal foods and garden supplies, they sold over 700 mowers a year, over half of which were Mountfield - and half of those were rear roller machines. The owner, Louis Guillou told me “Le ‘Stripes’ Anglais are a real selling point. Nobody else sells them so we can make a greater margin”.
Hence the posters of Wimbledon which punched home the point (ignoring of course the unlikely event of the Centre Court being tended by a Mountfield M5 rotary as it was then probably).
And elsewhere in our newsletter you will read of French manaufacturer Etesia introducing a striping roller, but I bet the clamour for that came from the UK rather than their home market!
True we now operate in a different retail climate, but the French market was then, and is now, almost solely driven by price - so for specialist dealers like Louis Guillou it was a question of ‘vive la difference’.
And isn’t that what specialists have to do today? Not only to punch home the ‘vive la difference’ message about what makes THEM different, but to use opportunities like Wimbledon, Test matches, Ascot and so on to showcase their message.
