NEXT ISSUE SERVICE DEALER BUSINESS QUARTERLY Magazine Summer 2013 published July 2013
Featuring Heritage Awards 2013 Focus on the North East Edwin Budding: a visionary Dairy of a Season Distributor Focus: Handy at 75 Countdown to SALTEX Download new Media Pack
ARE WE MISSING A TRICK? In the end, it's all in the name
Listening to Quentin Letts’ entertaining homily to the British lawn on BBC Radio Four this week, I once again found myself wondering whether we haven’t, as an industry, missed a trick.
In short, there seems to a disconnect between what we sell - and what the customer wants to buy. And it comes down to names.
At the representative level, we are categorised as the Land-Based Engineering industry, ideal for quangos and professional ‘pigeon-holers’, but useless to anyone else outside. Even drilled down to be called the garden machinery industry, it is still a description that flies over the head of many consumers.
Mind you, it is not as bad as it was pre-internet, for visually we can now promote our wares and services much more effectively than before. And whilst we sell so much more than just lawnmowers, the common denominator, the focal point, is the lawn.
And yet, many specialists stop short of providing a real turn-key service to the home-owner, centred entirely around making the best of the lawn space around the home.
I have thought for some years, and it has become something of a hobby-horse, that dealers ought call themselves Lawn Care Centres, offering the best and most appropriate kit of course, but also all the ingredients and trappings to make the best of the lawn.
We seem to stop short of going beyond the mechanical solutions, when actually we could be offering grass seed, fertilisers, design consultancy, turf advice, renovation services and so much more.
In Germany, Wolf Garten offer all the hardware and consumables for creating the perfect lawn - so the various elements are in place - but nobody has yet grasped the nettle to make it work as an all-embracing concept.
Yes, it would take a concentrated branding initiative by a supplier to turn his machinery dealerships into Lawn Care Centres, but at least they would do what it said on the tin.
If Quentin Letts is right when he says “The British male is a tolerant beast, you can tease him and tax him, but threaten his lawn and he will come over all unneccessary”, then we should be tapping into that psyche good and hard.
